Think about this: Brilliant thinker/artist works with a large commercial production company. They create something amazing together. But the artist feels compromised by the result, and distances himself from the project.
This has happened so many times that it seems to be a sort of pattern, destined to repeat throughout history. Here are just a few examples of many.
Oskar Fischinger and Fantasia: One of the greatest abstract animators in the history of the medium, Fischinger was invited by Walt Disney to California to work on Fantasia, a project that was an outgrowth of conversations between Fischinger and conductor Leopold Stokowski. While the team at Disney Studios was exposed to Fischinger’s breathtaking visual ideas, and those ideas greatly influenced their thinking, he himself was sorely mistreated by the studio, and in mid-production ended up quitting in frustration and disgust.
The final result — mostly in the opening Toccata and Fugue — is only a pale and highly watered down echo of Fischinger’s full vision. Yet even in its compromised form, the beautiful abstract ideas hinted at in the Toccata and Fugure were powerful enough to convince me to enter the field of computer animation.
Harlan Ellison and Star Trek: The City On the Edge of Forever is widely acclaimed as the best episode of the first series. Yet so many changes were made to Harlan Ellison’s original script that he distanced himself from the production, and in fact wrote a book years later, describing in detail his falling out with Gene Roddenberry and the studio over the episode.
In particular, he objected to the plot twist, added in later rewrites, in which Edith Keeler’s pacifist activism leads to Hitler winning WWII. This was in 1967, and Ellison was highly vocal in his opposition to the war in Vietnam.
Interestingly, it was Ellison’s original screenplay, not the revised version shown on television, that won the coveted Writers Guild of America Award for best dramatic hour-long script that year. So he had the last laugh.
Alan Kay and TRON: Bonnie MacBird did the heavy lifting on the script for the original TRON (with co-creator Steven Lisberger contributing visual ideas and notes). One of the first things she did was interview top computer scientists, and she ended up finding Alan Kay (she named the character of Alan Bradley after him).
Alan was the originator of the concept of the “personal computer”, as well as the leader of the team at Xerox PARC which developed object oriented programming, graphical user interfaces, and many other ground breaking innovations that were eventually, um, “borrowed” by Apple Computer and Microsoft. He also originated the saying “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Bonnie’s original script had many more ideas that tied the human drama together with ideas from computer science. Her version would have resulted in a much deeper and more thoughtful film. But Steven Lisberger insisted on shifting the focus to visuals and a sort of sci-fi pirate adventure. And after seeing his ideas become watered down, Alan distanced himself from the movie.
Visually, the film is still stunning, and enough of Alan’s ideas remain to make TRON a landmark in the depiction of virtual reality. And that’s not the only happy ending. One year after the movie came out, Bonnie and Alan fell in love and got married. And they’ve been happily married ever since.
How’s that for inventing the future!
.
Jef Raskin and the original Apple Macintosh. Ironically, Raskin was able to complete his vision with the Canon Cat. But it sank from the market without a trace.
I recall this being a problem with the film adaptation of The Shining as well… Granted, Stephen King has a long history of really weird luck with his adaptations.