Alan Moore's Celluloid Nightmares
by Brian Tallerico

BOOK: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999)

PLOT: Alan Moore wrote and Kevin O'Neill illustrated one of the best graphic novels of the last decade in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The series originally appeared as two six-issue limited series and, according to Moore, was initially conceived as a "Justice League of Victorian England," bringing together a super-team of some of the biggest stars of nineteenth-century literature (well, at least those characters who had fallen into the public domain). Moore set the first series, the main basis for the film, in 1898, as Miss Wilhelmina Murray (one of the leads of Bram Stoker's Dracula) gathered together an unusual league of "extraordinary" individuals to protect Victorian England, headed by pulp fiction hero Allan Quartermain (re-imagined as an opium addict), Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the Invisible Man, and even Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde (whom Moore re-cast as a 1800s version of the Hulk). The entire League deals with a power struggle between Sherlock Holmes' arch-villain Professor Moriarty and legendary Oriental baddie Fu Manchu. Yeah, it's awesome and, if you haven't read it, you've missed a landmark work in the medium. Moore recently released the final graphic novel in the series titled The Black Dossier, which follows the continuing adventures of Mina Murray and Quartermain, but also reveals the secret history of past leagues, which featured such characters as Gulliver, Natty Bumppo, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and more.

MOVIE: The 2003 film was adapted by comic writer James Dale Robinson, who seemed like a great choice to tackle the material. It wasn't like another writer was about to turn it into a Bruce Willis vehicle. (The presence of Stephen Norrington in the director's chair, who directed the above-average first Blade movie, also inspired some confidence.) We all thought Robinson, being from the world that Moore was such an important figure in, would do the League justice. In Robinson's screenplay, Sanderson Reed, a British emissary, tries to talk Allan Quartermain (Sean Connery) into returning to action to save the world. After pulling the standard Connery "I'm too old for this sh*t" routine, Quartermain eventually heads to London and meets M, a mysterious man who explains that he's going to recreate the "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" to stop The Fantom from destroying Venice. Hmmm... and no red flags went off when that premise was pitched? Anyway, Quartermain and Reed team with Captain Nemo, Rodney Skinner (the Invisible Man), Dr. Jekyll, and Mrs. Mina Harker (a full-on, bat-transforming vampire, which differs greatly from her story in the original text). They also add to the mix Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray and Tom Sawyer (yes, THAT Tom Sawyer), which begs the question, what studio executive looked at Moore's original story and said, "You know what we need? MORE characters." What was once (and still is) a dark, interesting world in Moore's comics turns into a silly costume fight closer Billy Zane's The Phantom or Mystery Men... but not intentionally funny.

NIGHTMARE: As if the 16% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes wasn't bad enough, this one essentially ended the career of the one and only James Bond, Sir Sean Connery, who cited the turmoil in making the film and his disillusionment with the "idiots now in Hollywood" as his reasons for retiring from acting. Behind-the-scenes, Fox was sued over the film after producer Martin Poll and screenwriter Larry Cohen accused the studio of stealing the idea from a 1993 pitch for a film called "Cast of Characters." No one ever bothered to mention that League was based on a graphic novel because, by then, it was so loosely based and Moore was so distant from the film, that they might have forgotten and the similarities to "Cast of Characters," including Tom Sawyer's involvement were a little unusual.

Long before that lawsuit, everyone involved was already playing damage control for a film that feels like it was a disaster from day one. In July of 2001, Robinson responded to scathing reviews of a leaked draft of his screenplay by saying at Comic-Con, "The problem is if you divorce yourself from how much fun it is to read that comic, it isn't really a movie. It takes four issues to get them going. They immediately go after Fu Manchu and then they meet betrayal and it's all over." Apparently, no one bothered to ask the important follow-up, "If it isn't really a movie, why make it one?" Robinson claimed that he was pressured by the studio to change the pace and add Tom Sawyer. And this was long before we got to see the disastrous final product.

But it was the lawsuit that really shocked Moore, who himself was named as a plagiarist. He told Comic Book Resources, "They seemed to believe that the head of 20th Century Fox called me up and persuaded me to steal this screenplay, turning it into a comic book which they could then adapt back into a movie, to camouflage petty larceny." Moore himself even had to give a ten-hour deposition. It set Moore back on his heels and clearly affected the way he would respond to films made from his works in the future. He even said that he'd "have nothing to do with films anymore. If I owned the sole copyright, like with 'Voice of the Fire,' there would not be a film. Anything else, where others owned copyrights, I'd insist on taking my name off future films. All of the money due to me would go to the artists involved. I'd divorce myself from the film process, the film industry and any adaptations." Little did he know that Hollywood wouldn't grant him that divorce willingly.

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