How Nottingham Became Robin Hood: (Part of) the Story Comes Out
How does a good idea become a terrible movie? That’s the perennial question in Hollywood, where the intersection of creative ideas, business sense and big egos can so easily produce something very different from what was originally intended.
That seems to have been the case with Robin Hood, which was originally meant to be based on a hot screenplay by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris called Nottingham. Then Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott came along and everything changed. Eventually the result was a film that stands at less than %50 Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and was beat by Iron Man 2 in that film’s second weekend. So what happened?
If you haven’t seen Robin Hood, treat everything after the jump as mildly spoilerish.
I’m going to lay this out in stages, as explained, for the most part, in
a blog post written by screenwriter William Martell.
Stage One: Nottingham
The script was originally sort of a procedural tale, told from the perspective of the Sheriff as he investigated Robin Hood’s actions and tried to figure out who was ‘terrorizing’ the area. Arguably not a bad take, certainly novel within the context of other movies that deal with the character. A little silly, perhaps, but likely to be easily salable to the audiences that make CSI and Law and Order monster pieces of programming.
Stage Two: Archery
Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe come on board, and Brian Helgeland is hired to rewrite. Frustrating given that the heat on the script is what caused the movie to move so quick in the first place, but let’s not confuse the heat of the actual pages with an enthusiasm for a concept that a studio knows it can sell like ice in the desert.
But here supposedly is where Scott, recently obsessed with archery, has the focus of the story shift to archers. That aspect is seen, to some extent in the final film, as Robin is part of an a division of archers that is returning from the Crusades with Richard the Lionhearted.
weiterlesen
Als Lesezeichen weiterleiten