|
I know it shouldn't come as any surprise to hear that a big screen movie based on G.I. JOE directed by Stephen Sommers and working from a script that was rushed into production at the last moment before last year's writers strike would turn out bad. Apparently rumors had been swirling around Hollywood for weeks now that Paramount was aware that G.I. JOE: RISE OF COBRA was a major stinker, and with a budget said to be between $150-200 million, "major" is indeed the word for such a stinker. The story finally broke open today as numerous movie websites (Joblo, CHUD, Latino Review, Hollywood Elsewhere, AICN, Movieline, etc) have been reporting on a mysterious post on the message board of TRANSFORMERS' producer Don Murphy from someone claiming to have inside knowledge of the behind the scenes debacle:
"After a test screening [of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra] in which the film got the lowest test score ever from an audience in the history of Paramount, the executive who pushed for the movie -- Brad Weston -- had Stephen Sommers, the superhack director of the film, fired. Removed. Locked out of the editing room.
Stuart Baird, a renowned fixer editor, was brought it to try to see if G.I. Joe could be made releasable. Meanwhile producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, whose turkey Imagine That (also championed by Weston) explodes this weekend as the new bomb in theatres, was told his services were no longer needed on the film either.
Sommers was then forced by his William Morris agents to pretend that he was working on Tarzan over at Warner Brothers, doing design work, even though that film doesn't even have a good script yet. When word of the firing started to be whispered about in Hollywood, Sommers was summoned back to the editing room but merely to save appearances. Baird is still re-editing the movie with studio input.
Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner, who turned down other offers from the property to go with the script that was rushed out in eight weeks by Stuart Beattie (i.e., because of the writer's strike), is frantic that the Sommers-created debacle will destroy the brand and is now distancing himself from the pending catastophe.
None of this needed to happen. The problem is that someone did not know the mythology. Lorenzo di Bonaventura was in charge of the film and never contradicted Sommers on anything. Lorenzo, so you know, was previously a senior Warners honcho and had GI Joe under option there (not as a producer) for seven years and he refused to greenlight the film, stating that because he grew up in Italy he had no knowledge of it.
If you google enough, at one point you will see he wanted the film to be about an action hero named Mann (Action Man...got it) and he clearly had no clue what the GI Joe world really was.
And the hapless hack Sommers? Where did he come from? The confused Jon Fogelman at William Morris, who signed Hasbro away from CAA, had to find a director in a hurry for his new clients and gave [Paramount] the only guy who he repped who would do it. A sad end to what could have been a great franchise. Acceleration suits indeed."
That above post detailing the behind the scenes "G.I. woes" has since been erased from Murphy's board, which isn't too surprising given di Bonaventura is one of his producing partners on TRANSFORMERS. But the genie now appears to be out of the bottle and as they say, "where there's smoke, there's fire." Talk inside the movie industry of the film being atrocious had been quietly making the rounds but nobody wanted to say anything publicly until now. CHUD.com's Devin Faraci added fuel to the fire with these comments on their message board:
"The story is essentially true. This has been common knowledge in town for a little while now.
But this story is like an iceberg, and there's a lot more under the surface that will never get reported, and that I won't go on the record about. Let's just say that the reporting on this is a battle of puppeteers.
From what I've heard the film couldn't be salvaged no matter who was editing it, so they brought Sommers back on to make it HIS disaster and so that he couldn't whine to the press that his vision was ruined by the studio."
Nothing like some good ol' Hollywood backstabbing and media manipulation to go along with bad news of a potential big budget bomb.
Lorenzo di Bonaventura has begun doing damage control claiming to Latino Review that all of it is nonsense and everything is turning out great. What would expect him to say? It's not like he or any other producer would admit to as much even if it were 100% true.
Chances are we're going to hear a whole lot more about the behind the scenes foibles and then find out for our own just how true these stories are when G.I. JOE: RISE OF COBRA opens on August 7th. I do have to say that the morbid curiosity as to just how terrible this movie has turned out is the first thing that's made me want to go see it. I also now marvel knowing that I will have now lived to see three of the great loves of my childhood (Masters of the Universe, Godzilla, G.I. Joe) made into awful Hollywood motion pictures.
Now I just have one question regardless of whether or not any of this is accurate. After the fiasco that was VAN HELSING, who in the right mind would give Stephen Sommers full creative control over a megabudget tentpole blockbuster movie? And then let him cast Marlon Wayans in a key role to boot?
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
foywonder's journal
