The Sandman That Never Was
The story of the infamous unmade ’90s movie
Attempts to bring The Sandman to the screen started early. Neil Gaiman was first approached about a possible movie adaptation as soon as 1991, with screenwriting duo Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (who would go on to pen the Pirates Of The Caribbean films) attached. They wrote a draft that, like the TV series, adapted Preludes & Nocturnes and The Doll’s House. Gaiman reportedly liked it, as did Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary who was hired to direct the film. It was faithful in spirit to the comics and notably included the “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” sequence – perhaps one of the reasons the studio declared the script ultimately “undeliverable”.
Elliott and Rossio moved on, but Avary kept working, eventually turning in his own draft. It ditched the cats, added an unwise narration from Morpheus and moved more of the action Stateside, but was still mostly true to the comics. The studio, however, still had misgivings that reached a head when Avary tried to sell them on the idea of making the sequences in Dream’s kingdom look like Jan Švankmajer’s art house adaptation of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. He eventually walked away from the project due to a creative clash with executive producer Jon Peters.
Peters was an infamous figure for comics fans in the ’90s, having argued against Tim Burton’s dark take on Batman. The Sandman movie he wanted to make would not be atmospheric and strange like the comics, but a film in which a brawling Morpheus punched his archenemy the Corinthian out. After Avary’s departure he had a new screenplay written by William Farmer, which Gaiman famously described as “quite easily the worst script I’ve ever read”.
Farmer is open about the problems with his screenplay. “It was clear from the start that the goal of the project was to take the Sandman name and use it as a franchise, while making the actual story something more ‘for the masses’,” he told David Hughes in his book Tales From Development Hell. “There were things the producers wanted done that took it in a different direction, and as I was a fledgling screenwriter, I figured you take the suggestions of the ones writing the cheques.”
What were those things? “The producers were adamant that the coming millennium must play a big role… Of course this was folly, as the millennium turned out to be no big deal – nobody really gave a shit.” Gaiman’s cerebral hero also beats people up and is revealed to be the brother of both Lucifer and the Corinthian. At least Farmer refused to write one requested scene: Morpheus at a rave. No, really.
Gaiman was enraged and publicly trashed the script, leading to a fan backlash against the potential film. Farmer’s work was abandoned and The Sandman returned to the realm of great comics destined never to make it to the screen… until now.