After Sixty-Three-Thousand Years In Development, They Finally Filmed "I Am Legend"

For years it was supposed to be a Schwarzeneggerian vehicle. No kidding, they've been working on the dumb script to Richard Mathieson's sci-fi apolocaypse vampire story since, I'm pretty sure, forty years before the story was actually written. So many people have taken turns working on the script they actually ran out of writers and had 10,000 chimps banging randomly on typewriters for a while. (The chimps' draft was rejected, but then produced under the title Norbitt.)

The Charleton Heston flick Omega Man was based on it, I think, or an extremely litigable ripoff of it. Apocalypse, future, vampire mutants, the last man left on earth... and his missing is to kill pretty much everything else left on earth.

What's not to like?

Oh yeah: Will Smith.

Don't get me wrong; I'm a Will Smith fan. In the right genre, which is breezy, loose-limbed comedy-action (notice comedy-action, not even action-comedy).

If he's been able to pull off a star turn in a more serious action movie -- let alone a dark horror-action movie -- I'm not aware of it. (And he was only a co-star in ID4.)

I've seen Smith try a darker, deeper, richer performance in a sci-fi movie. It was called I, Robot. His performance, I mean, not the movie.

Although actually I think they also wound up calling that I, Robot too, dispensing with the original title, Blade Runner: The Retard Cut.

Thanks to Slublog.

posted by Ace at 08:35 PM

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