The Making of Judge Dredd (Stallone Version)

[Bat King]

It was a cluster-fuck.

Accurate

[sheldipez]

Yup, interesting stuff.  It's just a shame that they didn't have the balls to make a proper Dredd movie. 

I'm sure that I have commented elsewhere on here that I don't think much of the '95 film.  That said, it did show an MC1 that I was more familiar with than the latest movie.  I also think Stallone was not a bad fit for the character - there is a bit in the movie early on in the block war where the rookie gets shot and then it shows Dredd and he looks more than a bit angry and snarls one of his ammo choices.  For those few seconds, downard grimmace and helmet intact I actually bought Stallone as Dredd. 

Schwarzenegger would have been totally wrong but I always wonder how a Clint Eastwood Dead Man/Necropolis movie would have turned out.

I think 2013 Stallone would be a good fit for Dredd, he's significantly toned the ham down and his acting chops has been refined a lot since then IMO. Always feel like I need to duck for cover when I mention Stallone and Dredd together 

[Recrewt]

I think 2013 Stallone would be a good fit for Dredd, he's significantly toned the ham down and his acting chops has been refined a lot since then IMO. Always feel like I need to duck for cover when I mention Stallone and Dredd together 

Well, he is about the right age. 

[shaolin_monkey]

That's a really interesting write up.  Quite an insight into film making by commitee. Too many cooks, and all that.

It's just such a bloody shame it had to happen to our beloved character.

[Frank]

I think 2013 Stallone would be a good fit for Dredd, he's significantly toned the ham down and his acting chops has been refined a lot since then IMO. Always feel like I need to duck for cover when I mention Stallone and Dredd together 

It's not his ability that's in question, it's his understanding of the character and the strip. Stallone's on record as saying the mistake they made with the '95 film was not being wacky and goofy enough. You know those bits where Stallone's doing double takes and trading schtick with Rob Schneider; those are the bits Stallone thinks they got right. My ideal Dredd film would be funny, but not the I knew you'd say that kind of funny.

Sure, if you glued a helmet to his head and hit him with a stick every time he started mugging, Stallone could play the part perfectly well - but why go to all that bother?

[Zarjazzer]

Those Hollywood fools don't know anything compared to me.

Rob Schneider should have been Dredd and Stallone the hapless side kick.

[JudgeGerry]

Good find Minty. 

Stallone's Dredd is ok for a Hollywood/Comedy  action film with elements Dredd which is a fun film to watch.

Karl Urban is Dredd Proper. The big factor was Dredd 3D was an independent production and Urban read Dredd as a youngster 

[malkymac]

Years of hard work by loads of people and millions of dollars spent just to produce a pile of shite.

A clusterfuck indeed.

[Bolt-01]

Thanks for that- really enjoyeable read.

[Call-Me-Kenneth]

What a wasted opportunity......


Thanks for posting this, I enjoyed reading it.

[sans saisons]

I had a chance to read one of William Wisher's early drafts (Feb 93) and it's distinctly a different story from the Steve De Souza rewrite, which is available online, let alone the resulting film. The producers were exalted on Wisher's initial draft, delivered in or around November '92, only to start piling notes on him in the times to come. Hence, this draft is likely to have been revised somewhat to accommodate them. Stallone was still few months away from signing on, ditto Andy Vajna and Cinergi.

The De Souza draft (dated March 94) is actually very close to the film. Subsequent writers like Cinergi in-house script doctor John Fasano, Total Recall co-writer Gary Goldman and director Danny Cannon lessened the dialogue in many points, cut out some bits that actually worked (a fuzzy-logic Central Computer) and diluted the on-screen references to Angel Gang's cannibalism. In brief, it's the film, only marginally better.

What surprised me is that the Wisher draft I read was a completely different animal in comparison. No flying Lawmasters, Rico is a mutant, Griffin is a tragic scumbag, Fergie is still mildly irritating but gets his comeuppance time and again. Many times, I actually wondered how Rico, with his "sand-caked voice" and hulky posture, not to mention his appearance as a leader of a revolt, reminded me of Bane in Dark Knight Rises. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We open with Fergie, arriving into his new home on Victor Lazlo block. Having been presented some of haughty cityscape with a Very Big Statue of Judgment right behind the Statue of Liberty, the focus shifts to a narrow corridor where Fergie is faced with... A Fattie. After an amusing confrontation, Fergie stumbles on to some rezzies, who are about to engage in a Block War with the opposing Mick Jagger Block. Hershey and Brisco come around and race their Lawmasters down the block for cover (more sensible than covering), and stand by waiting for backup...

Meanwhile, Council Judge Griffin is getting ready for a showdown with the presiding Chief Judge Fargo. It's suggested Griffin's had his eye on the big chair for a while and has persuaded the other Council members to have Fargo ousted - the Block War is his excuse to put that plan into action. Fargo, for his part, is an effable elder statesman, having more heart towards the city residents than petty political squabbles. He stares the council down after Griffin's dare, calls them out as a bunch of women and resigns to the Long Walk.

Griffin's first call as Chief Judge is to deal with the Block War by dispatching Dredd. And Dredd comes in, alright, with six street Judges in tow. He's immediately acting like a seasoned vet, sending the other six to pacify the Mick Jagger Block and taking on Lazlo with Hershey and the rookie. Pat Wagons are coming in, we'll be given a first-hand look on the routines of judging and booking hundreds of rezzies. Wisher makes good work of Dredd's rep as a legendary street Judge; many armed rezzies simply surrender at the sight of him. The rookie bites the dust again, much the same way as in the film. Dredd wipes the perps out, and unceremoniously executes the sole survivor point-blank for assault on a Judge.

Fergie has had his own problems with the panicked Fatty running amok on the narrow corridors. Dredd picks him up from a garbage chute on his way out and books him. Dredd is also confronted by Vardis Hammond, the leader of the block's civil defense group, who's unimpressed with the Judges and Griffin's campaign to disarm the citizens.

Afterwards, Dredd manages to catch up with Fargo, whose about to embark on the Long Walk. Wisher also introduces the Grand Hall of Justice  nicely with Dredd taking the rookie's possessions up to the Hall of the Dead, both to revisit it on the plot later on and to show Dredd actually gives a damn about his fellow street Judges, no matter how arrogant and short-lived they end up being.

Meanwhile, news of Griffin's promotion reaches Aspen and Warden Miller sees an opportunity, given he knows the secret of the Apollo Project (renamed Janus in the film). He calls Griffin up and makes the Chief Judge sweat by using Rico as a bargaining chip. Only Miller's plan fails gloriously and Griffin will live to regret he ever usurped Fargo as Rico comes to town with the Warden's head and a pack of his mutant cronies.

Dredd is again framed for the murder of Hammond by Rico, is trialed and sent to Aspen. Of course, the shuttle never gets there, and Dredd and Fergie march across the Cursed Earth - battling Gila Munjas and meeting up with Fargo - to confront Rico, whose meanwhile becoming a very big problem for Griffin and the Council. Rico's efforts to liberate Mega-City One from the clutch of the judicial system ultimately serve only his own ends (imagine that) and a reign of terror begins, with rezzies signing into the newly-found militia and taking the city over, block by block.

The broad strokes of the story therefore would remain intact throughout the (re)writing process, but the world felt much more organic in comparison; Griffin's ambitions remain unrelated to Rico, who simply seizes the opportunity to get out of jail and into Mega-City. I particularly liked the way Wisher handled the character arc of Griffin - he gets gradually pushed all the more against the wall by Rico and Jurgen Prochnow would've had a field day while depicting the doomed, ambitious politician, instead of the textbook bad guy he would eventually become.

Unfortunately, the script fizzled a bit midway, as Wisher was knowingly writing an Arnie vehicle. This means filling the third act with wall-to-wall action sequences, which would've likely been entertaining, but I felt the painstakingly established Mega-City became more embroidery and less of a character on its own.

Dredd does hook up with the underground rebellion much in the vein of Demolition Man, and ends up in fisticuffs with Rico atop the Statue of Judgment. It all reads well enough, but doesn't quite match the wonderful vibe of the script's first half - the tail-end of the story plays out like an above-average action movie with Dredd in the lead.

Still, Dredd suits up again (helmet and all) for the final confrontation with Rico, which is a nifty (if apocryphal) touch on Wisher's part to return the hero back to his comfort zone, having survived all recent tribulations but one. Thankfully, there are no clones stirring up in incubators at this time, and no catfights, either. Ultimately, Dredd gets the job done and revs up his Lawmaster to patrol the streets again, with a minor smile on his face to imply he may loosen up on his rigid behaviour in times to come.

It's a Hollywood adaptation, but a reasonable one at that. The main problem the producers likely had was the scope: Wisher creates grand vistas of Mega-City and fills it with hundreds, maybe thousands of people. While reading, I considered the visuals in Ridley Scott's Gladiator as sufficient, but this was 1993; the high water mark at the time was Jurassic Park.

Other than that, the style was "off-the-wall Blade Runner", with the Fatties, mutants, and Gila Munjas. What's more, the lead character starts out as "a fair oppressor" and maintains faith in the system throughout. We are led to believe he and the system become more human, instead of the simpler plot solution of a revolt. Judge Dredd never "evolves" into Joe Public.

Structurally, the script divides roughly midway into Order (first half), with the aforementioned political intrigue and Dredd as a street Judge, and Chaos (second half), with Rico center-stage and Dredd on the lam with the underground rebellion. I actually could've traded some of the action to more Griffin, as he certainly had the most character development going on for him, and I was genuinely curious to see where he'd go. This might've also glued the script together more, as Griffin already represented the system itself in the story, and how it becomes all the more unhinged in the course of the events.

In short, I felt the Wisher draft is much of what Dredd 95 would've deserved. The most functional change in the De Souza draft was replacing the Gila Munjas with the Angel Gang, while Danny Cannon would add Mean Machine. This is so because I felt the those characters were superfluous in grand scheme, leaving it down to preference. Whatever works for you as the "comeback fight" for beaten Dredd. The biggest loss was Griffin, who'd by then been revised from a hapless Chief Judge to a Bad Guy bandied with Rico. Wisher's characters resided in grey moral areas at times, beginning with Dredd. Deep down, there was the good story.

[JOE SOAP]

Apart from the obvious bastardisations of the adpatation the main problem with the early Wisher draft (and subsequent drafts) is Dredd comes across as a total sleeper- a dumb lunk who's a victim of the machinations of plot and easily manipulated by stronger characters while always waiting to be provoked into any kind of response. An over all weak protagonist- a milquetoast whom things are done to rather than a strong character who drives the film. It really underlines how fearful they were to adapt the character as is; that ultimately all their efforts to push the peas around the plate and try to avoid the harsher Dredd rendered the writers paralysed to make him into anything at all.

This weakening of Joe resulted in an effort to compensate by making Rico a more cliched over-the-top character with an alternate mutated and power seeking guise.

[JOE SOAP]

Screen-writer Steven De Souza talks about Judge Dredd '95:




Which brings up the Judge Dredd rating controversy...

Judge Dredd was actually supposed to be a PG-13 movie. The production companyat the time, Cynergy, they were having some financial troubles, so they didn't have any UK executives on location in England. And in their absence, the director (Danny Cannon), wanting to make it true to the comic book, was making everything more and more and more violent. So when the movie was delivered to be cut, it was rated X. It was rated X four times!

They say you can't appeal after four. Four is all you get. Somehow, the producer, Ed Pressman managed to get it one more time to get it rated R. Which actually wasn't a victory, because this was supposed to be PG-13. They had made a deal with Burger King, I think, and a toy company and you can't advertise toys for an R-Rated movie, and no hamburger place wants toys for an R-Rated movie. So the hamburger people and the toy people turned around and sued Disney, the distributor!

Well, Disney then said, we'll take this out of the director's hide, because he signed a piece of paper saying he would deliver a PG-13. But Cynergy, who was releasing it THROUGH Disney, at that point had never done anything BUT an R-Rated movie. Nobody in the entire company had ever had the experience of putting that piece of paper in front of a director...so they had to pay him. They couldn't withhold his salary for violating a legal promise they never asked him to make.

So at the eleventh hour, in a total state of panic, they decided that the advertising campaign should be cartoon panels. Keep in mind that this movie was about five frames away from being an x-rated movie. Their ad campaign was now comic panels of Stallone with word balloons. It's complete cognitive dissonance!

Now, I'm innocent in this. I wrote a PG-13 script! Obviously, I knew how to do it! I did 8 o'clock network TV shows, for god's sake! In the script I wrote that the villain, Armand Assante says "Pull his arms and legs off, save his head for last, I want to hear him scream." I wrote in the script that all you would see are the shadows and hear screams. What the director did, without any supervision since nobody from the studio was there, he had his prop people build an audio animatronic puppet, lifelike in every detail, with breakable limbs, and he actually shot the robot ripping the guy's arms and legs off while the guy is screaming!

At the time, I lived around the corner from the studio, and they called me up when they got the dailies. It was the scene where they whack a newspaper reporter and his wife. In the script, I said it would look like your grandparent's house, but decorated with stuff from now, since the movie is in the future. You were supposed to just see through the curtains a flash of the machine gun and screaming, and maybe one bullet hits the window. That's what I wrote. When they showed me the scene in the dailies, this old couple dies like Bonnie and Clyde. Blown to bits in slow motion. I said, "Oh my God, this movie is supposed to be PG-13!" And they said, "No, it's fine! the director knows all the ratings angles. Run it again!" And I'm like, "No! Once was enough! What did I miss?" He said, "They're dry squibs! That's PG-13! You don't get an R-rating unless there's blood." I said, "There's no such rule! Who the fuck told you that?"

When they put the movie together, there were no alternative takes. The only thing they could do with that scene was to take away the slow-motion and kill them faster, and cut the time of the violence down a little. The payoff is that a few years later, Stephen J. Cannell pitched me to be the writer on his Greatest American Hero movie at Disney. When I pitched at the meeting, everything went great. After I left, Stephen called me up, and he said, "I don't understand. It was all going great, but the minute you left they said: there's no way that sonuvabitch is ever gonna write a movie at Disney. He fucked us so bad, we were sued by Burger King and the toy company for Judge Dredd. He wrote an x-rated movie for this studio!" I was persona non grata at Disney because of Judge Dredd!


A good thing Burger King never read Burger Wars.

[malkymac]

Screen-writer Steven De Souza talks about Judge Dredd '95:




Which brings up the Judge Dredd rating controversy...

Judge Dredd was actually supposed to be a PG-13 movie. The production companyat the time, Cynergy, they were having some financial troubles, so they didn't have any UK executives on location in England. And in their absence, the director (Danny Cannon), wanting to make it true to the comic book, was making everything more and more and more violent. So when the movie was delivered to be cut, it was rated X. It was rated X four times!

They say you can't appeal after four. Four is all you get. Somehow, the producer, Ed Pressman managed to get it one more time to get it rated R. Which actually wasn't a victory, because this was supposed to be PG-13. They had made a deal with Burger King, I think, and a toy company and you can't advertise toys for an R-Rated movie, and no hamburger place wants toys for an R-Rated movie. So the hamburger people and the toy people turned around and sued Disney, the distributor!

Well, Disney then said, we'll take this out of the director's hide, because he signed a piece of paper saying he would deliver a PG-13. But Cynergy, who was releasing it THROUGH Disney, at that point had never done anything BUT an R-Rated movie. Nobody in the entire company had ever had the experience of putting that piece of paper in front of a director...so they had to pay him. They couldn't withhold his salary for violating a legal promise they never asked him to make.

So at the eleventh hour, in a total state of panic, they decided that the advertising campaign should be cartoon panels. Keep in mind that this movie was about five frames away from being an x-rated movie. Their ad campaign was now comic panels of Stallone with word balloons. It's complete cognitive dissonance!

Now, I'm innocent in this. I wrote a PG-13 script! Obviously, I knew how to do it! I did 8 o'clock network TV shows, for god's sake! In the script I wrote that the villain, Armand Assante says "Pull his arms and legs off, save his head for last, I want to hear him scream." I wrote in the script that all you would see are the shadows and hear screams. What the director did, without any supervision since nobody from the studio was there, he had his prop people build an audio animatronic puppet, lifelike in every detail, with breakable limbs, and he actually shot the robot ripping the guy's arms and legs off while the guy is screaming!

At the time, I lived around the corner from the studio, and they called me up when they got the dailies. It was the scene where they whack a newspaper reporter and his wife. In the script, I said it would look like your grandparent's house, but decorated with stuff from now, since the movie is in the future. You were supposed to just see through the curtains a flash of the machine gun and screaming, and maybe one bullet hits the window. That's what I wrote. When they showed me the scene in the dailies, this old couple dies like Bonnie and Clyde. Blown to bits in slow motion. I said, "Oh my God, this movie is supposed to be PG-13!" And they said, "No, it's fine! the director knows all the ratings angles. Run it again!" And I'm like, "No! Once was enough! What did I miss?" He said, "They're dry squibs! That's PG-13! You don't get an R-rating unless there's blood." I said, "There's no such rule! Who the fuck told you that?"

When they put the movie together, there were no alternative takes. The only thing they could do with that scene was to take away the slow-motion and kill them faster, and cut the time of the violence down a little. The payoff is that a few years later, Stephen J. Cannell pitched me to be the writer on his Greatest American Hero movie at Disney. When I pitched at the meeting, everything went great. After I left, Stephen called me up, and he said, "I don't understand. It was all going great, but the minute you left they said: there's no way that sonuvabitch is ever gonna write a movie at Disney. He fucked us so bad, we were sued by Burger King and the toy company for Judge Dredd. He wrote an x-rated movie for this studio!" I was persona non grata at Disney because of Judge Dredd!


A good thing Burger King never read Burger Wars.

They really should have released this version.