LOST SOUL: THE DOOMED JOURNEY OF RICHARD STANLEY'S ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (2014)

Studio:       Severin Films
Director:    David Gregory
Writer:       David Gregory
Producer:  Carl Daft, David Gregory
Stars:     Richard Stanley, Fairuza Balk, Rob Morrow, Edward R. Pressman, Robert Shaye, Tim Zinnemann, Bruce Fuller, Marco Hofschneider, Fiona Mahl, Graham Humphreys

Review Score:

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Summary:

Cast and crew recall the ill-fated production of “The Island of Dr. Moreau” under the film’s original director Richard Stanley.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Writer Kier-La Janisse and journalist Michael Gingold recall how Richard Stanley emerged as a promising genre filmmaker following the reception of his 1990 sci-fi thriller “Hardware.” After his second feature “Dust Devil” in 1992, Stanley began working on an adaptation of “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” a project once thought to be the film that might propel Stanley into stardom as an auteur director.

Montsegur, France – 2011 – Richard Stanley reviews concept art and storyboards for the ill-fated production before detailing the film adaptation history of H.G. Wells’ 1896 novel, starting with the 1932 film “Island of Lost Souls.”

London – 1993 – With neither money nor pull to push the project on his own, Stanley worked with artist Graham Humphreys to create concept art that might drum up interest in bringing his vision to the screen. Stanley imagined actor Jurgen Prochnow as Dr. Moreau. Although she is not part of Wells’ novel, Stanley created cat-lady Aissa for his version of the story in tribute to a similar character he felt was underutilized in previous film adaptations. Stanley ultimately got noted producer Edward R. Pressman interested in the project.

Los Angeles – 1994 – Former studio president Robert Shaye and script reader Tim Sullivan discuss New Line Cinema’s early involvement with “The Island of Dr. Moreau” under president of production Michael DeLuca. Executive producer Tim Zinnemann and Aissa actress Fairuza Balk contribute additional recollections.

DeLuca chose Marlon Brando to play Dr. Moreau. Shaye was immediately concerned, knowing how difficult Brando was to work with on “Don Juan DeMarco.” New Line also moved to replace Richard Stanley with Roman Polanski as the director.

Stanley sought supernatural assistance from a warlock nicknamed Skip in order to remain attached to the project. Specializing in invisible mending, Skip performed a blood ritual with his coven in London at the same time Stanley had his initial meeting with Brando at the actor’s home. The meeting went unexpectedly well. Afterward, New Line was compelled to reinstate Stanley over Polanski at Brando’s insistence.

Bruce Willis was added to the cast for his star power. James Woods accepted the third lead role of Montgomery.

Casting of creature actors, location scouting, and makeup effects work began. FX artists interviewed include Bruce Fuller and Dave Grasso of Stan Winston studios, as well as Paul Katte and Nick Nicolaou. Beast people actors interviewed include Marco Hofschneider, Fiona Mahl, Neil Young, and aboriginal native David Hudson.

Tim Zinnemann saw initial indications that Stanley may have trouble managing a large cast and budget during preproduction. Stanley gave producers additional pause when he began showing signs of paranoia and behaving irrationally, including walking aimlessly from Burbank to Hollywood after feeling confined by his apartment accommodations.

Bruce Willis’ divorce from Demi Moore complicated his attachment to the film. Stanley replaced him with Val Kilmer, resulting in a $30 million total for a budget initially projected at $5-8 million. Riding the height of his star power around the same time as “Batman Forever,” Kilmer’s demands included a 40% reduction in his shooting days. Kilmer was appeased by switching him to James Woods’ less prominent role. Rob Morrow was cast to fill Val Kilmer’s original part.

Cairns, Australia – 1995 – The production set up camp on location. Production designer Graham ‘Grace’ Walker built a set inconveniently located one hour away from the crew’s hotel according to Stanley’s specifications.

Stanley isolated himself during preproduction, missing meetings with producers, communicating through drawings, and focusing mainly on the creatures as actors trained for months with animal expert Peter Elliott. The question arose if Marlon Brando would show up to set at all after the suicide of his daughter Cheyenne in April 1995. Stanley became increasingly reclusive as cast, crew, and producers grew concerned that he was in over his head.

Stanley recalls a series of strange events befalling the production around this time. A production assistant was bit by a poisonous spider and lost flesh on her hand. Stanley’s mother’s house was struck by lightning. Stanley learned that the warlock Skip suffered from a debilitating condition at the same time and all of his magical fixes came undone.

Kilmer played a power game by having petty disagreements with Stanley over scene construction while filming. Various cast and crewmembers recall Kilmer being rude, arrogant, and abrasive. A final straw in turning the crew against Kilmer was the actor using his cigarette to singe the sideburns of camera assistant Jack Wareham.

Rob Morrow recalls acting without any direction. Morrow made multiple phone calls in an attempt to exit the production when torrential rains shut down the show for several days. Production was ultimately put on hold.

A rumor disputed by Fairuza Balk made it back to New Line that Richard Stanley, becoming increasingly erratic, climbed a tree and refused to come down. After Kilmer reported his displeasure with the working conditions, Tim Zinnemann advised Michael DeLuca to make a change. Ed Pressman fired Richard Stanley through Stanley’s agent.

The rest of the cast was disheartened to learn of Stanley’s forced departure. Fairuza Balk threatened to cut out her own heart with a sushi knife, and had production assistant Hugh ‘Lewis’ Dickson drive her across the continent to Sydney to leave the film in solidarity with Stanley. Balk was later forced to return under threat of being blacklisted in Hollywood.

Richard Stanley had a breakdown and shredded documents in an attempt to make it harder for the film to be finished. New Line offered to pay out his contract, but fearing he might sabotage the production, insisted he agree to not come within a fixed distance from the set. Stanley subsequently disappeared and no one was able to locate him.

After a number of other directors turned down the project due to demands created by the shutdown delay, John Frankenheimer was brought aboard to replace Richard Stanley. Frankenheimer’s first assistant director James Sbardellati remembers incredulity at learning that the set was built so far from the hotel. Actors recall difficulty working with Frankenheimer due to his disposition and overall disinterest in the project.

Fairuza Balk and other interviewees relate anecdotes about Marlon Brando continually changing his character, insisting on wearing an ice bucket on his head, promoting diminutive actor Nelson de la Rosa to his sidekick, and being fed lines by an assistant through an earpiece because he didn’t read the script. Additional anecdotes suggest Brando was deliberately disruptive for his own amusement, such as by wanting to reveal Dr. Moreau as a dolphin simply to confound New Line’s Bob Shaye.

Lewis Dickson found Richard Stanley living in solitude in the rainforest after learning his location from a group of extras. So as to not violate his agreement with New Line, but to satisfy his curiosity about the production, Stanley returned to set disguised as an extra, playing the part of a bulldog-man.

“The Island of Dr. Moreau” went on to become a box office disappointment. Increasingly unable to relate to the everyday world, Richard Stanley relocated to the Pyrenees Mountains in France. With his agent no longer returning his phone calls, Stanley largely retreated from filmmaking, reemerging only occasionally for nonfiction or short projects.

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Review:

Arriving after “Jodorowsky’s Dune” (review here), before “The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened” (review here), and narrowly edging out “Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four” (review here) for wordiest subtitle, “Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau” belongs to a wave of behind-the-scenes documentaries chronicling “what if?” movies that didn’t turn out as initially envisioned, if they came to be at all.  In fact, of the four films featured in those four documentaries, only 1996’s “The Island of Dr. Moreau” made it to the big screen, albeit in heavily Frankensteined form and without original director Richard Stanley at the helm.

“Lost Soul” additionally wins out as the only one of those documentaries with an honest-to-God anecdote about how the director resorted to witchcraft to thwart a cabal of Marlon Brando, Roman Polanski, and New Line Cinema conspiring to sack him from his own project.  And the spell seemingly worked… for a brief period of time.

Hot on the heels of “Hardware” and “Dust Devil” in the early 1990s, Richard Stanley was prophesized to be the next big thing in fantastic filmdom, at least in the eyes of genre journalists and cult movie fans.  Neither film gave the director any real standing in Hollywood or put coin in his pockets though, so getting his adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “The Island of Dr. Moreau” off the tarmac was nowhere close to being a slam dunk.

“Lost Soul” is the story of hooks, crooks, and hoops Richard Stanley turned to or jumped through to bring his longstanding dream to life.  “Lost Soul” simultaneously tells the TMZ tale of how a force majeure superstorm of prima donna politics, arrogant antics, and broken black magic boomeranged back to poison that dream into an unbearable nightmare.

David Gregory’s documentary is impartially diplomatic when it comes to the question of whether Richard Stanley was a misunderstood genius in the making or a powder keg poised to explode from self-sabotage and inexperience.  Actors and actresses such as Fairuza Balk warmly recall Stanley as passionately enthusiastic about the project as proposed.  Audiences see this charming creative spark for themselves when Stanley, two decades removed from his vision’s unexpected strangulation, giddily gives the camera a drooling “look, look!” presentation of unused storyboards showcasing a mutant baby suckling a mutant nipple.  Producers like Tim Zinnemann responsibly counterpoint sympathetic sentiments about unappreciated artistry.  Their business-centric viewpoints suggest a socially awkward amateur swimming against a current destined to drain in a pool of paranoia and nervous breakdowns.

Stanley may at least be able to hindsight smirk knowing he is not the only person who suffered on that set.  By all accounts save the extras who boozed, screwed, and filled hotel rooms with Hot Wheels on New Line’s overtime dime, making “The Island of Dr. Moreau” was a miserable experience all around.

Hollywood gossipmongers get a fix of the good stuff with “Lost Soul.”  Any whispers you may have heard about the ill-fated production, from Marlon Brando’s irrational insistence on wearing an ice bucket atop his head to fired Richard Stanley returning to set disguised as a background beast man, are incredibly all true stories and “Lost Soul” tells them all.  Stanley evens recalls Fairuza Balk threatening to cut out her heart with a sushi knife upon hearing of his curt dismissal, though Balk herself oddly doesn’t address this directly.

With Brando and replacement director John Frankenheimer now deceased, no punches are pulled by anyone’s frank recollections of Frankenheimer being a terrible taskmaster and Brando brandishing an ego that could eclipse the sun.  Richard Stanley had retreated to the rainforest by the time both men arrived.  Stanley disappears from the documentary at this point in the timeline too.  That makes some sense, though his extended absence seems odd in a movie whose subtitle bears his name.

Val Kilmer, whose movies now open straight to a cardboard bin in grocery store checkout lanes, bears a bigger brunt of everyone’s unhappy memories.  Kilmer reportedly used the peak of his post-“Batman Forever” box office power to test the limits of how insufferable he could be and still get away with it.

Brando played the same power game.  But Stan Winston Studios effects artist Bruce Fuller encapsulates their competing streaks of nonsense behavior best.  Fuller agrees both men meant to stir the pot, yet Brando’s “legendary contempt” for his craft manifested in good, if conceited, humor and he wasn’t mean about it.  Kilmer was a “prep school bully” extinguishing cigarettes on a camera assistant’s sideburns just because he could.

Reviewing a documentary requires separating the story from its technical presentation.  “The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau” part of “Lost Soul” has the story aspect in the bag.  The filmmaking side of “Lost Soul” on the other hand, could stand to take sandpaper to its sides.

Not all of the talking head footage is cleanly shot.  New Line Cinema honcho Robert Shaye, for instance, is interviewed practically in unintentional silhouette.  With dozens of D.P. credits to his name, cinematographer Jim Kunz ought to know better than to have Shaye positioned in front of the blown out background of a wide daytime window next to a white wall.

Chyron credits could also stand to appear more often.  Familiar faces like Fairuza Balk don’t require reintroduction.  But remembering who is who among 20+ other interviewees can take a minute for memory to kick in.  Particularly when there are two Tims, two Grahams, two people using nicknames, and you’re caught struggling to recall who was a producer and who was the production designer.

“Lost Soul” would further benefit from an expanded epilogue about the aftermath’s effect on Richard Stanley’s prematurely castrated career, as the standing summary is cut almost as short.  Someone might counter that these quibbles above are akin to lamenting the taste of the bun when the quality of the burger is what matters more.  If that is the only case with clout, then “Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau” contains all the juicy meat anyone could want when it comes to exposing the madness that goes into making a movie.

Review Score:  85

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