By all accounts The Drop Edge of Yonder, or Zebulon as the script was titled, was truly one-of-a-kind, going way beyond the acid-western genre Wurlitzer helped create. In part we have Dennis Hopper’s Last Picture Show (1971) to blame for the Zebulon no-show, as studios got the jitters after Hopper’s disaster failed the acid-test and they bailed on any more projects financed on the back of the surprise success of Easy Rider (1969).
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- Barry Gifford and Francis Ford Coppola’s On the Road
Coppola missed a trick when he left Barry Gifford’s screenplay of On the Road in the layby of great adaptions not-to-be. Before hiring Gifford, who co-wrote Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography, Coppola had in mind to direct a version with Billy Crudup and Colin Farrell taking on the roles of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, armed with a Russell Banks screenplay. Previous Coppola attempts at getting this project off the ground also included Ethan Hawke and Brad Pitt donning Levi’s and going on the epoch-defining road trip. But of all versions not to have seen the light, Barry Gifford’s screenplay is by far the most tantalising.
Gifford’s work with film began on a high when David Lynch adapted his novel Wild at Heart in 1990. The two worked together again on the screenplay for Lost Highway, and he also wrote two episodes of Lynch’s ill-fated and underrated mini-series Hotel Room.
As a novelist, short story writer, and memoirist, Gifford has held the firm ground of cult status since the early ’90s, with Wild at Heart and six subsequent Sailor and Lula novels and novellas. Gifford has also been hyperactive in other fields, notably founding the legendary Black Lizard Press, responsible for resuscitating the work of Charles Willeford (one of the driving influences on Tarantino’s writing in Pulp Fiction), Jim Thompson, and Elliot Chaze.
In an interview, Gifford said that not seeing his On the Road adapted “has been the one biggest disappointment I have had in dealing with the movie business.” Things were close to production: “I wrote the screenplay, this must have been 1995 or so, and it was all set to go with Gus Van Sant directing, Francis producing. Everybody wanted to be in the movie, it was green lit at Columbia Pictures, and then the deal fell apart due to Francis’ own conflicts with Columbia Pictures over another deal.”
The movie that eventually dribbled onto the big screen took few risks and was a self-consciously nostalgic period piece. Perhaps the best way to imagine what could have been with Gifford and Gus Van Sant taking the reins is to just read the novel and skip the Sam Riley (can a convincing Ian Curtis convincingly become Jack Kerouac?) and Garret Hedlund road movie that’s likely to do little more, if you love the book, than drive you round the bend.
- Rudolph Wurlitzer’s Zebulon
We can be thankful we have the novel The Drop Edge of Yonder by Rudolph Wurlitzer, published in 2017 by the trailblazing indie press Two Dollar Radio. Jim Jarmusch made Dead Man in 1995 as a result of an ongoing collaboration with Wurlitzer, and while Dead Man has quintessentially Jarmuschian moments, if watched after reading The Drop Edge of Yonder, it’s hard to believe Wurlitzer wasn’t given a writing credit.
Many of Wurlitzer’s most ambitious film projects have not materialized, including the Sam Peckinpah-inspired project that also became another novel – Slow Fade, but Wurlitzer’s film credits still have clout: Two-Lane Blacktop (directed by Monte Hellman), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (directed by Sam Peckinpah), America (directed by Robert Downey Sr.), Walker (directed by Alex Cox), Candy Mountain (co-directed with Robert Frank), Homo Faber (aka Voyager) (directed by Volker Schlöndorff) – yes, Wurlitzer is a rare creature who is as serious a novelist as he is a screenwriter.
By all accounts The Drop Edge of Yonder, or Zebulon as the script was titled, was truly one-of-a-kind, going way beyond the acid-western genre Wurlitzer helped create. In part we have Dennis Hopper’s Last Picture Show (1971) to blame for the Zebulon no-show, as studios got the jitters after Hopper’s disaster failed the acid-test and they bailed on any more projects financed on the back of the surprise success of Easy Rider (1969).
- Robert Altman and Barry Hannah’s Power and Light
In his downtime while staying in the coveted crow’s-nest of Altman’s Malibu home, Barry Hannah became a fan of Benny Hill and grew to hate the idyllic writing room where Altman put him up in the early ’80s, hoping, after reading Hannah’s manic masterpiece Ray, the maverick writer would help reinvigorate his creativity in the post-Popeye slump.
In a letter to Gordon Lish in 1981, Hannah wrote: “Am writing with Robert Altman, Power and Light, about women hardhat workers.” We can piece together the story because in a strange move Hannah wrote a full treatment, an odd screenplay-novel hybrid, which he went on to sell to a publisher for $455 and publish under the memorable title Power and Light: A Novella for the Screen from an Idea by Robert Altman. Overall it comes across as something between Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar and Altman’s own Nashville, with a series of vignettes tied together by union troubles and Jimi Hendrix’s grave.
Altman survived the trauma of Popeye and Barry Hannah his alcoholism to create some of their best work post-collaboration. Power and Light will always remain the odd-one-out in Hannah’s bibliography, although if it had found its way into Altman’s filmography, it would only have added to the knickerbocker-glory-quality of his genius.
- William Faulkner’s 1984
Perhaps the least substantial of all these never-to-be projects, with nothing more to show for it than a brief mention in a Paris Review interview from 1956, is Faulkner’s 1984. Faulkner said he had an idea for a big screen adaptation of Orwell’s dystopian novel that would “prove the thesis I’m always hammering at: that man is indestructible because of his simple will to freedom.”
Faulkner was ambivalent about Hollywood; while it gave him relative stability financially for much of his life, he never saw it as more than a salaried position. Howard Hawks, who would become Faulkner’s closest Hollywood ally, remembered their first meeting: “He came into my office and I said, ‘My name’s Hawks.’ He said, ‘Yes, I’ve seen it on a check.”
By 1956, when Faulkner was speaking to the Paris Review, his Hollywood career was coming to an end. His last screen credit is on the Hawks’s film Land of the Pharaohs (1955). It’s tempting to imagine what would have become of a Faulkner/Hawks 1984.
The first feature film version of 1984 was produced in 1956, directed by Michael Anderson of Dam Busters fame, starring Edmond O’Brien as Winston. In 1984, it was brought to the big screen again with John Hurt in the wrought role of Winston.
As there is little to go on, with no surviving script, what Faulkner would have brought to Orwell’s dystopian fable on the screen we can only guess.
- Luis Buñuel and Man Ray’s Sewers of L.A
With no technical experience or apprentice work under his belt, Luis Buñuel relied on pure visionary charge to create his first film, Un chien Andalou (1929), which the godfather of Dada and Surrealism André Breton called “the first Surrealist film.”
After leaving France and Spain for Hollywood in 1938, Buñuel found little success, aside from selling some jokes to Chaplin included in The Great Dictator (1940). There was also an ill-fated orgy Chaplin arranged for Bunuel, but the girls only had eyes for Chaplin. Buñuel’s Hollywood period would produce no screen credits, largely because he was shunned by the studios after Salvador Dali described in public his split with Buñuel over their political differences: Dali remained faithful to Franco’s fascism, Buñuel was a staunch socialist.
Buñuel (left) with cameraman Gabriel Figueroa during the filming of The Young One (1960). Editor’s collection.
He survived by doing dubbing assignments for the rest of his time in Hollywood. But of the projects – including a gothic thriller and film version of Under the Volcano – that were not to see the light of day, the most interesting of Buñuel’s unrealized projects was his collaboration with Surrealist photographer and filmmaker Man Ray, on a script titled Sewers of L.A. All we really know is that it was going to be set on a mountain of excrement near a highway and a desert of dust. Conceived during the postwar Freeway Metropolis years, when L.A was constantly shifting between phases of renewal and large-scale rebuilding, Sewers of L.A. would probably have been a cross between his Los olvidados (1950), a powerful, lyrical film focusing on life in Mexico City slums, and the high-pitched Surrealism of his earlier Un chien Andalou (1929) and L’age d’or (1930).
We can only imagine.
