Sunday, November 10, 2024 - 5:41 PM CST

Oliver Stone adaptation of The Demolished Man in 1991 was recognised as one of the greatest unproduced screenplays ever written. Stone was to have directed the movie but left because of the filmmaking technology wasn't there for the director at the time.

Sunday, November 10, 2024 - 10:13 PM CST

Close, but some of your details are off, according to a 1991 article in the New York Times - Oliver Stone's screenplay was written in 1980, and he was keen to make it at that time, and that was when his producers were unsure about the technology to bring Stone's vision to the screen. Then, around early 1990, a producer contacted Stone saying that he owned the rights to the screenplay, and asked Stone if he would like to make the film, as the technology seemed to be falling into place - but Stone turned him down, and his words (pasted below) indicate that he simply did not feel the passion for that prject anymore, as when he had first written it.

Here's the excerpt from the NY Times article, written by Neal Koch, from July 21 1991 - 

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/21/arts/between-screenplay-and-screen-stretches-the-highway-to-oblivion.html

Mr. Stone's "Demolished Man" never even came close to a camera. His 1980 screenplay is based on Alfred Bester's science-fiction novel of the same name. The story centers on a 25th-century tycoon who, driven by nightmares and financial troubles, murders a competitor with the help of a mind-reading psychiatrist. At the time, studios had a hard time seeing how many of the sci-fi elements could be transferred to the screen.

"It was a pretty radical screenplay in terms of the techniques I wanted to use," recalls Mr. Stone, whose credits include "The Doors," "Platoon" and the forthcoming "JFK." "It was written as an aural symphony. Unfortunately, no one at the time saw it as anything near commercial." And he did not yet have a big enough name to draw financing on his own. So, he says, "it sort of vanished into that huge development pile in the sky."

Then, a year and a half ago, Mr. Stone says, a producer claiming to own the rights to the screenplay called, asking Mr. Stone if he would direct "Demolished Man." Current technology presumably has made the script far less intimidating than it seemed a decade ago, and Mr. Stone has since become a hot property.

Sunday, November 10, 2024 - 10:45 PM CST

Another missed opportunity by Mr Stone was Mission: Impossible 2 which would have attacked corporate capitalism, technology surveillance and made stinging political implications. Instead we get the John Woo mess of a movie that was ruined in the editing room from its three hours runtime down to two hours.