Salvador Dali’s ‘Giraffes on Horseback Salad’ (1937)
Most film directors have a list of movie projects they never manage to make. Some are started like Orson Welles’ Don Quixote but never finished—though posthumously released in a re-edited form. Others like Hitchcock’s R.R.R.R. never quite make it from idea to script to studio green light.
L.A. based artist and designer Fernando Reza has created a stupendous selection of film posters for movie projects by directors like Hitchcock, Welles, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch and even Salvador Dali that were discussed, planned, and even partially filmed but never completed.
Take for example Salvador Dali who planned to make a movie with the Marx Brothers called Giraffes on Horseback Salad in 1937. Dali was friends with Harpo Marx and the pair decided to work together on a film project. Dali had already made two short films with Luis Bunuel (Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’or) and would later go on to collaborate with Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock designing dream sequences for Dumbo and Spellbound.
Dali and Marx concocted a story about an aristocrat played by Harpo falling in love with a woman whose face is never revealed. The great Surrealist intended to use the film to show:
...the continuous struggle between the imaginative life as depicted in the old myths and the practical and rational life of contemporary society.
The film was to include scenes with a “horde of burning giraffes wearing gas masks, and Harpo catching dwarves with a net.” A script was apparently written but the other Marx Brothers nixed the idea thinking the idea a stinker and the script not very funny.
Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Kaleidoscope’ aka ‘Frenzy’ (1964-67).
Alfred Hitchcock wanted to make a prequel to Shadow of Doubt with another “Merry Widow Murderer” luring women to their grisly deaths. As with Psycho, Hitchcock had devised three set pieces to focus on the three gruesome murders carried out by the deviant sex-fiend. The first murder was to take place by a waterfall; the second on board a disused warship; the third in an oil refinery against brightly colored oil drums.
Unlike Psycho or Shadow of Doubt there was no moral counterpoint to the “relentless sex and violence” shown onscreen. A script was written and test scenes shot. Among the actors considered for the lead role were Michael Caine, Robert Redford and David Hemmings. The film was basically a slasher movie a decade ahead of its time. Universal Studios vetoed the idea—thinking Hitchcock’s movie too amoral and too dark.
Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Aryan Papers’ (1976-95).
Stanley Kubrick spent twenty years developing The Aryan Papers, a movie that would depicting the horrors of the Holocaust—the extermination of six million Jews by Germans during the Second World War—through the experiences of one individual. He originally approached Isaac Bashevis Singer to write a screenplay but the famed Yiddish author turned it down.
Kubrick then decided to film Louis Begley’s 1991 novel Wartime Lies that told the story of young Jewish couple in Poland who escape Nazi persecution during the war by pretending to be Catholics. He spent four years developing a script but became depressed by the unmitigated horror of the subject matter. Kubrick eventually gave up the project when he heard Steven Spielberg was making a movie of Thomas Keneally’s book Schindler’s Ark—the true story of Oskar Schindler who saved 1,200 Jewish people from certain death in Nazi concentration camps.
David Lynch’s ‘Ronnie Rocket’ (1978-present).
Apparently David Lynch has not quite given up hope on making Ronnie Rocket—a kind of follow-up or rather follow-on to his cult debut feature Eraserhead. Ronnie Rocket tells the twin stories of a detective who can travel into an alternate universe by standing on one leg; and a disfigured dwarf named Ronald d’Arte who, after a surgical mishap, finds he has power over electricity, which somehow leads to him becoming a rock star named Ronnie Rocket. Lynch was unable to find financing for the film in 1978, and so shelved the project while he made The Elephant Man.
In the 1980s, an opportunity to make Ronnie Rocket came to Lynch via Dino de Laurentis, who offered to co-produce Lynch’s project with Francis Ford Coppola’s production company American Zoetrope. Lynch polished his script adding several new scenes including one involving a 200 foot wall of fire. This was all to be shot at the legendary Cinecitta Studios in Rome. However, Coppola’s then new feature One from the Heart bombed and its failure bankrupted American Zoetrope. Ronnie Rocket was put back in the drawer where it has remained hibernating to present day—though Lynch still harbors hopes of making it one day.
Guillermo Del Toro’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (2006-12).
Is there any other director currently more suitable to bringing H. P. Lovecraft’s dark visions to the screen than Guillermo Del Toro? The great director of Cronos (1993), Mimic (1997), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Hell Boy (2004), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and Crimson Peak (2015) certainly would seem to be the perfect choice for bringing Lovecraft’s unnameable horrors to the screen.
In 2010, Del Toro planned to film Lovecraft’s tale At the Mountains of Madness. The story of an arctic expedition that uncovers evidence of cosmic Elders (ancient astronauts) who once came to Earth has often been considered ripe for filming but its themes and downbeat ending have proven problematic for film studios. Having co-written a script with Matthew Robbins in 2006, Del Toro noted Warner Brothers were not too keen on financing the project:
The studio is very nervous about the cost and it not having a love story or a happy ending, but it’s impossible to do either in the Lovecraft universe.
In 2010, it was announced a 3-D film version would be made with James (Titanic, Aliens, Terminator) Cameron producing. Alas, this was halted when Ridley Scott made the latest installment in the Alien saga Prometheus in 2102 which contained many similar elements to Lovecraft’s story.
Fernando Reza’s posters are available to buy here and more of his superb work can be seen here.
Via BOOOOOOOM!