Alan Moore's Celluloid Nightmares
by Brian Tallerico

Remember the SAT questions like "Hand is to glove as foot is to ______?" Here's a new one for you: "Alan Moore is to movies like oil is to _______?" If you answered "water," then you certainly know your comic book movie history. If not, us The Deadbolt geeks are here to give you a primer on the disastrous legacy of one of the most important figures in the history of comic books and his horrible luck with the movie industry.

In much the same way that SO many Stephen King novels were massacred on film before a decent one finally emereged - you can count the good King movies on one hand - famed comic book scribe Alan Moore has had nothing but bad luck in the world of adapted screenplays. Moore has repeatedly watched his stories hit the silver screen in forms that barely resembled his source material, all with a level of behind-the-scenes drama that has bordered on the ridiculous.

To his great credit, the mad Englishman hasn't stayed quiet about it. Would you? While other writers stand back and watch the Hollywood machine dismantle their works, Moore holds nothing back, publicly dismissing the biggest adaptations of his projects, taking his name off the seemingly lucrative ones, and even allowing the machinations of Hollywood to impact his work as a writer. And it's not like a bad writer-filmmaker relationship is the only thing that has damaged the Moore flicks, these things are cursed well beyond bad screenwriting or the awkward stylings of Shane West - The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell, Constantine, and V For Vendetta. They all have had more than their share of backstage drama. It usually leaves the final product permanently scarred, at least in their original creator's mind.

We hope the pattern changes with Zach Snyder's Watchmen but the pre-production and shooting have followed Moore's typical pattern, with a lawsuit springing to life this past month. In light of the latest news about the drama surrounding Watchmen, us graphic novel fans at The Deadbolt couldn't stop thinking about the history of Alan Moore's celluloid nightmares. If you want it boiled down into a simple summary - ALWAYS read the book first. That way you know what you'll unquestionably be missing.

BOOK: From Hell (1991-96)

PLOT: Originally published in ten volumes from 1991-96, From Hell was collected in one gigantic form in 1999 and became an instant hit. The incredible mix of history and fiction centers on the theory that the murders of Jack the Ripper were much more than just a maniac with a knife. Author Stephen Knight theorized that the murders were part of a conspiracy to conceal the birth of an illegitimate royal, but Moore takes only part of Knight's theories and builds his own fictional examination of the Ripper murders that gets all the more captivating with each page. From Hell isn't a crime novel that's meant to give you any answers (the first misunderstanding that made the movie go so wrong). Moore merely used the world of Jack the Ripper as a background to tell an amazing story. Moore said to The Comics Journal in 1991 that "the Ripper murders-happening when they did and where they did-were almost like an apocalyptic summary of... that entire Victorian age. Also, they prefigure a lot of the horrors of the 20th century." We're going to sound extremely repetitive in sentences like this, but like nearly everything in this feature, From Hell is a must-read. You won't be able to put it down.

SCREENPLAY: In what would become a trend for Alan Moore movies, the source material was altered drastically when the Hughes Brothers turned it into a film that valued action over mood and altered some characters almost completely. According to an interview in The Comics Journal in 2006, the film is closer in plot to a thriller from 1978 called Murder by Decree than the actual Alan Moore graphic novel. Johnny Depp stars as Inspector Frederick George Abberline and perhaps the least period-looking actress of all time, Heather Graham, was cast as Mary Kelly. Screenwriters Terry Hayes and Rafael Yglesias turn Moore's work into a whodunit, something the original never purported to be. Small problem - we still don't know for sure who made Jack such a not-so-dull boy and Moore's version of the tale reveals his suspected Ripper almost from the outset, so turning From Hell into a whodunit made for a beautiful but very anticlimactic film. The tacked-on happy ending was so insulting, especially to fans of the graphic novel, that it literally hurt.

NIGHTMARE: Moore wasn't shy about his feelings on what happened to From Hell's transition from page to screen. Even before the movie came out, he was starting to sense the divide between what he did on the page and what made it into the film. He told Stewart Lee in 2002 that he had only seen a trailer and that he was starting to get annoyed by "the fallacious modern notion that making a movie of something somehow validates it. A Michael Crichton book, for example, is a template, with characters blank enough to be inhabited by any actor and a schematic sequence of events, so it makes a good film. But, as a rule, adapting from one medium to another is dodgy." It was at this time that Moore made it clear that he would do all he could to divorce himself from the films based on his books. Moore said, "As long as I could distance myself by not seeing them," so it's clear he felt assured that no one would confuse his originals with the film interpretations. Unfortunately for Moore, it would get much worse before it would get better.

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