It should be obvious to us: the creation of a film is a long and painstaking artistic, financial and logistical process, and nothing is inevitable. Everyone involved in it, from the leading actors to the most junior technical crew, was chosen at least in part on who was available and on what terms, so it is simply a matter of logic that decisions could have gone in other directions.
Yet great cinema is such a powerful and enduring part of our cultural landscape and our visual imagination that we struggle to imagine alternatives, while remaining—and I don’t think I’m speaking purely for myself here—fascinated by the counterfactual history of film. It is in a way a manifestation of the uncanny, as we try to balance a mental image of something we know so well, which is so profoundly part of our experiences, yet in which some aspects, often major ones, are somehow different.
It is a psychological experience which was explored by Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 essay Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen (“On the Psychology of the Uncanny”) and developed by Sigmund Freud in 1919 in Das Unheimliche (“The Uncanny”). In cultural terms, the critic and academic Nicholas Royle, in his book The Uncanny (2003), explained the feeling as:
A peculiar commingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar. It can take the form of something familiar unexpectedly arising in a strange and unfamiliar context, or of something strange and unfamiliar arising in a familiar context.
Who will play the Don?
Let’s think about this in the context of one of the acknowledged classics of cinema, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Released in March 1972, it became the highest grossing film of the year and reached takings of $100 million more quickly than any previous film.
The critics hailed it too. Pauline Kael in The New Yorker called it “a movie with the spaciousness and strength that popular novels such as Dickens’ used to have”, and one of the aspects which would emerge as iconic was Marlon Brando’s performance as the titular crime boss, Don Vito Corleone. Andrew Sallis, writing in The Village Voice, said that “Brando’s star presence dominates every scene in which he appears”, and in 1973 Brando won the Golden Globe for best actor in a motion picture drama and the Academy Award for best actor (famously he declined the latter in protest at Hollywood’s portrayal of native Americans, sending actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather to explain his decision).
Brando’s casting, which created such a memorable image of a mafia don, was initially championed by Mario Puzo, who had written the novel on which the film was based and co-wrote the screenplay with Coppola. Executives at Paramount Pictures, which was producing The Godfather, were considerably less enthusiastic: his last film, The Nightcomers (1971), had been a commercial disappointment, and it was ten years since his last unquestioned box office success, as Fletcher Christian in 1962’s Mutiny on the Bounty. Even then, he had been difficult to work with, demanding, controlling and often moody.
So the actor was no shoo-in, and there were many other names mentioned. Coppola did not object to the idea of Brando’s casting but was also interested in Laurence Olivier (by then Lord Olivier). Robert Evans, vice-president of Paramount in charge of production, pressed for the Italian producer Carlo Ponti (War and Peace, Dr Zhivago, Blowup) or Ernest Borgnine, while Charlie Bluhdorn, who owned Paramount’s parent company Gulf+Western, wanted Charles Bronson.
For a while it seemed like any actor of a certain age and standing might be in the frame. Burt Lancaster, George C. Scott, Anthony Quinn and Richard Conte were all bruited (the last eventually took the role of Don Emilio Barzini, Corleone’s great rival). Orson Welles wanted the part and made strenuous efforts to persuade Puzo of his case, and Danny Thomas, the vastly successful comedian and producer, toyed with buying a controlling stake in Paramount just so he could ensure he played Corleone.
As late as January 1971, it still seemed at least a two-horse race, with Borgnine the favoured candidate of the studio but Brando being granted a screen test. In the end, the audition was decisive: Brando transformed himself in front of Coppola and became the character the film needed. The director recalled a few years later:
I had it down on tape. I’d watched forty-seven-year-old Marlon Brando turn into this aging Mafia chief. It was fantastic.
It became one of the most recognisable roles in cinema history. Yet for a long time the odds were against it happening at all.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…
Hollywood is littered with tales like this. It is not merely that, as anyone would expect, various options for leading roles were considered, but that the eventual outcomes were sometimes initially second choices or exercises in damage limitation. Perhaps one of the most extreme examples was George Lucas’s casting of Harrison Ford as Han Solo in Star Wars (1977). The director wanted the main roles to be played by unknown, or at least little-known, actors. This was partly for financial reasons, but it also stemmed from his approach to film-making: he wanted the characters to work well together as a unit rather than as a constellation of competing stars. Speaking to film critic and historian Leonard Maltin in 1995, Lucas explained:
What I was trying to do is see how they all look together and work together as a group, not as individuals, and I think that was a very important part about the casting is as I cast a group I didn’t cast one person.
Lucas had worked with Ford before on the 1973 coming-of-age comedy-drama American Graffiti, and the actor had also played a supporting part in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), which meant he was hardly unknown. But Lucas asked him to help with the auditions for Star Wars by reading lines with the actors who were under consideration.
Of course, Lucas was eventually won round to casting Ford himself, but the list of potential Han Solos is dizzying: James Caan, Chevy Chase, Robert De Niro, Richard Dreyfuss, Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Jack Nicholson, Nick Nolte, Al Pacino, Burt Reynolds, Kurt Russell, Robert Englund, Sylvester Stallone, John Travolta and Christopher Walken were all said to have tried out, and any one of them would have made the film a very different experience. There can be few major roles in cinema history for which Steve Martin and Christopher Walken both auditioned.
Beverly Hills Cop: an accidental revolution
Perhaps the most seismic casting decision, with the benefit of hindsight, was that of Detective Axel Foley in the zeitgeist-capturing Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer action comedy Beverly Hills Cop (1984). The film had a long genesis, beginning in Simpson’s fertile if cocaine-fuelled imagination in 1977 as the story of a detective transferring from the overwhelmingly Hispanic East Los Angeles to upmarket Beverly Hills. Danilo Bach was commissioned to write a screenplay, and by 1981 it featured a Pittsburgh policeman called Elly Axel. Again it lost momentum, until Simpson, flushed with the success of Flashdance in 1983, decided it would be his next major project.
One-time literary agent Daniel Petrie Jr was brought in to revise Bach’s script, turning the lead role into Axel Elly from Detroit and changing it from an action film to a more light-hearted project with comedy elements. Paramount Pictures loved the new incarnation and the producers were off and running. But the casting of the lead role, eventually christened Axel Foley, would be worthy of a film in itself.
According to Bruckheimer, Mickey Rourke, a former boxer who had appeared in Body Heat, Diner and Eureka, was given a $400,000 holding contract to play the lead, but left when revisions to the script took longer than anticipated and he was offered work elsewhere. The next candidate was Sylvester Stallone, who rewrote the screenplay, excising the humour and returning it to a muscular, indeed bloody, action film. Later he would recall that “by the time I was done, it looked like the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan on the beaches of Normandy”.
Simpson was not interested in Stallone’s reimagining of the project, and Stallone refused to compromise, so the deal fell through. At some point, Al Pacino and James Caan were both considered, and Harrison Ford turned the role down. It was after Stallone’s departure, however, with shooting due to begin a fortnight later, that Simpson and Bruckheimer did something extraordinary: they asked Eddie Murphy to play the part of Detective Axel Foley.
Murphy was barely 23 years old, an electrifying stand-up comic who had blazed across Saturday Night Live to a Hollywood debut opposite Nick Nolte in 48 Hrs. (1982). The following year he partnered fellow Saturday Night Live star Dan Aykroyd in the brilliant John Landis comedy Trading Places as well as releasing a Grammy-winning comedy record Eddie Murphy: Comedian.
Anyone who has seen 48 Hrs. or Trading Places can have no doubt that Murphy, young as he was, could handle Hollywood stardom with aplomb. But Beverly Hills Cop was something else again: he was playing the lead role in a big-budget action film with a production duo riding the wave of Flashdance, and being paid $4 million for his services. And—this is important—he was black.
The status and recognition of black actors and actresses in Hollywood is a long, tortuous and often-inglorious tale; famously, Hattie McDaniel, who won an Academy Award in 1940 for her portrayal of Mammy in Gone With The Wind, had been unable to attend the film’s premiere in Atlanta because the cinema was segregated, and was only admitted to the venue for the Oscars as a favour to producer David O. Selznick. The Bahamian-American Sidney Poitier had forced a change in attitudes with his leading roles in two 1967 films, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and Richard Roundtree became famous as “the first black action hero” when he played private detective John Shaft in the eponymous 1971 thriller and its sequels.
Nevertheless, by the early 1980s black actors were still often restricted to supporting roles or “black” films like the Blaxpoitation genre in which Shaft had been prominent. Murphy had made a major impact in 48 Hrs. but as a debut star had been clearly the junior partner to the established Nolte, 20 years his senior, while his role in Trading Places relied on his reputation as a comedian.
Beverly Hills Cop was different for two reasons. Firstly, although there was a strong and attractive comic element to the film, it was fundamentally an action thriller, with Murphy’s character seeking resolution after the murder of his childhood friend and Steven Berkoff in demonically sinister form as a violent drug lord. Secondly, as the saga of the casting revealed, the part of Axel Foley was not a “black” role and had not been created with Murphy in mind. He was cast as an actor who happened to be black, rather than as a black actor.
Hadley Freeman captures a sense of just how important this was in her brilliantly affectionate and witty tribute to the Hollywood films of the era, Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don’t learn them from movies any more):
He [Murphy] stuck in one or two jokes about his race in the movie, including in the hotel scene, but otherwise there is hardly any reference to it whatsoever, which seems both sweetly innocent and frankly incredible considering this is a movie about a black guy running around Los Angeles in the eighties with a gun. Yes, Foley is supposed to be an outsider in Beverly Hills but, according to the script, it’s the fact that he’s from Detroit that signifies his interloper status, not his race… for the first time in his career, Murphy’s race did not define his character.
The decision of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer to cast Murphy, then, may have been due at least partly to force majeure. While it is hard to imagine an interpretation of Beverly Hills Cop centred on Harrison Ford, a perfectly serviceable action film could have emerged with Mickey Rourke, Al Pacino or James Caan in the lead role (Stallone, for all his virtues, might not have been a success). Rourke went on to acclaim as a tough police captain in Year of the Dragon (1985), Caan had shown his abilities in The Godfather, and Pacino, as well as his dazzling performances in The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, had shone as a crusading New York detective in Serpico (1973) and as drug lord Tony Montana in Scarface (1983). None would, or could, have made Beverly Hills Cop so groundbreaking, so influential and, at times, so funny.
Flash: aaaah?
Of course an actor or actress in a leading role can have an enormous impact on a film, on its feel, tenor and impact. But the on-screen performers are not the only contributors to a film’s creation whose selection can be complicated and whose eventual participation can seem to have come about almost on the toss of a coin. There is a thought-provoking array of counterfactual scenarios which emanate from the making of the riotously colourful, campy and good-natured space opera Flash Gordon (1980).
It is a dazzling and sometimes bewildering production, plentifully stocked with heavyweight thespians like Max von Sydow and Timothy Dalton making ends meet, almost inexplicable appearances by playwright John Osborne and Shakespeare stalwart, writer and librettist Bob Goody and glimpses of early-career stars-to-be like Robbie Coltrane, Peter Duncan and Suzanne Danielle. The viewer might well reflect, as von Sydow savours a sinister chuckle or strokes his long goatee, that this is an actor who had appeared in 11 films by Ingmar Bergman, including the iconic chess scene with Bengt Ekerot’s Death in The Seventh Seal (1957). Had events fallen differently, however, there are all sorts of styles and aesthetics the film might have had.
The Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, a pre-war product of Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, had wanted to make a film featuring the comic strip character Flash Gordon since the 1960s. The hero had already been portrayed on screen by Buster Crabbe in the 1930s and then by Steve Holland in a television series which ran from 1954 to 1955, but De Laurentiis envisioned something more spectacular and colourful. He had produced two comic-based films already, both released in 1968: Danger: Diabolik, an international effort directed by Mario Bava, and Roger Vadim’s fabled Barbarella, starring Jane Fonda. (The two films shared several cast and crew members and were shot back-to-back.) They both had a strong, stylised visual identity which made the most of their illustrated antecedents and perhaps pointed the way for De Laurentiis’s conceptualisation of Flash Gordon.
But who would bring life to this idea? However incongruous it might now seem, De Laurentiis’s first choice for director of his planned feature was the idiosyncratic Italian auteur Federico Fellini, famous for La Dolce Vita (1960), 8½ (1963), Satyricon (1969) and Fellini’s Casanova (1976). He was also a skilled illustrator and caricaturist, so the genre was by no means unfamiliar to him, though stories that he had provided Italian-language dialogue for Flash Gordon comic strips after the Second World War are unreliable.
For a while it seemed as if the project might bear fruit. Fellini at least affected enthusiasm when De Laurentiis approached him, and went as far as optioning the rights from the producer in the early 1970s in preparation for making a film. Exactly what then happened is difficult to unpick, but the director for some reason decided not to go ahead and walked away from the idea. Fellini was, in any case, unconvinced by the very concept of the transition from comic book to silver screen. As he explained:
Comics and the ghostly fascination of those paper people, paralyzed in time, marionettes without strings, unmoving, cannot be transposed to film, whose allure is motion, rhythm, dynamic. It is a radically different means of addressing the eye, a different mode of expression.
His presence would flit spectrally through the finished product, even so. Danilo Donati, who designed the sets and costumes for the director’s Satyricon, Roma, Amarcord and Casanova, was engaged as production designer for Flash Gordon, while Princess Aura’s “pet”, played by diminutive Kenyan-British actor Deep Roy, was named Fellini.
At around the same time, it seems, a young science fiction-obsessed director who had dreamed of making a Flash Gordon feature approached De Laurentiis. George Lucas was in his late 20s and had made his directorial debut in 1971 with the enigmatic, stylised THX 1138, a dystopian vision of a future society. Although the film had performed weakly at the box office and received mixed critical notices, it had some cinematic heft: Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasance had played leading roles, Francis Ford Coppola had overseen production, Walter Murch had assisted with the screenplay and the soundtrack came courtesy of Lalo Schifrin.
It seems that Lucas was not what De Laurentiis was looking for. It may be that the option of Fellini as director was still in play, though it must have been sufficiently uncertain for De Laurentiis even to discuss any other possibilities. When he and Lucas met, however, the producer proposed that, as the rights-holder, he should receive 80 per cent of the profits. Whether it was an elaborate and indirect refusal or a wildcard bid, Lucas realised it was an unsustainable offer and withdrew. Undeterred, however, he drew heavily on the memories of Flash Gordon and other comics of his childhood as he set about writing his own space epic, which would eventually break cover in 1977 as Star Wars…
De Laurentiis was not done yet. If Fellini was unwilling and Lucas was not the right fit, he would look elsewhere, and his new candidate was innovative British director Nicolas Roeg. By this stage—it was the late 1970s—Roeg had an impressive roster of films behind him, including Performance (1970), Walkabout (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973) and The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), and had demonstrated a mastery of unsettling visual spectacle and a flair for the erotic.
Like Lucas, Roeg was a fan of the original Flash Gordon comic strips, and he worked on a proposal for the best part of a year, collaborating with production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, a BAFTA winner for 1971’s Death in Venice. Debbie Harry, riding mainstream chart success with Blondie, was slated to play Princess Aura, while the role of Ming the Merciless, Emperor of Mongo, would go to Keith Carradine, a rising Hollywood star of undisputed talent who had nevertheless made a very mixed array of films up until that point (the excellent Nashville and The Duellists, for example, contrasted with the misconceived Emperor of the North Pole and the grim so-called comedy Run, Run, Joe!).
Most striking of all, and only relatively recently uncovered, was Scarfiotti’s initial artwork for the film. Film-maker and writer John Walsh found around 40 images in the British Film Institute archives and included them in his 2020 coffee-table book Flash Gordon: The Official Story of the Film. The intended aesthetic of Roeg’s film, as revealed in Scarfiotti’s illustrations, is futuristic but organic and almost botanical; it is also, to be frank, often deeply suggestive and tinged with eroticism. It shows much more the unsettling and provocative Roeg of Performance and Don’t Look Now than the director of the David Bowie vehicle The Man Who Fell To Earth.
Roeg’s vision did not match that of De Laurentiis, and they parted company in 1979. John Walsh spoke to John Richardson, the special effects supervisor who had joined Roeg’s team towards the end, and remarked:
Richardson was taken aback because he was expecting something that had much more of a 1930s Chrysler motor look to it. Instead, Roeg was taking it in a completely opposite organic direction. In a sense, Dino was right to pull the plug.
One more name was on De Laurentiis’s wish list: spaghetti Western maestro Sergio Leone. He had not directed a feature film since A Fistful of Dynamite (also known as Duck, You Sucker!) in 1971, though he remained an occasional producer; he had turned down the opportunity to direct The Godfather on the grounds that it glorified the Mafia. Leone was, like Fellini, Lucas and Roeg, a fan of Alex Raymond’s original 1930s comic strip, which, in the end, was the downfall of his involvement: he regarded De Laurentiis’s plans as straying too far from the source material. Leone would only direct one more film before his death, though, as swansongs go, the epic, nearly four-hour Once Upon A Time In America (1984) is hard to beat.
After so many false starts, it hard to say that Dino De Laurentiis chose a safe option. Some time in 1979—like so many parts of the Flash Gordon story, precision is elusive—De Laurentiis approached accomplished director, producer and writer Mike Hodges to take control of the troubled project. He had certainly shown versatility, writing and directing iconic British gangster tale Get Carter (1971), frantic and rickety comedy thriller Pulp (1972) and an adaptation of Michael Crichton’s horror/science fiction novel The Terminal Man (1974). He had also made documentaries, children’s dramas and thriller features for British television.
Unlike his predecessors, however, Hodges knew virtually nothing about Flash Gordon nor comic strips in general. Perhaps that was an advantage, after the arrival and departure of Fellini and the others. By contrast, and ironic given the brief involvement of Leone, Hodges had been heavily influenced by Western films. He protested his unsuitability to De Laurentiis, mentioning that his only exposure to comics had been The Beano and The Dandy as a child, but the producer was steadfast, and perhaps growing desperate. Hodges was summoned to a meeting in New York, and returned on Concorde laden with Flash Gordon comic books in order to familiarise himself with the character and his milieu.
Flash Gordon would undergo more trauma and travails during its filming, and De Laurentiis’s original intention to make a sequel virtually straight away proved wildly and excessively ambitious. There would be no lucrative, long-running franchise, though De Laurentiis would go on to produce, among other films, The Bounty (1984), Year of the Dragon (1985), Red Sonja (1985), Evil Dead II (1987), U-571 (2000), Hannibal (2001) and Red Dragon (2002), before dying at the venerable age of 91 in 2010.
For better or worse, Flash Gordon was released in December 1980. In commercial terms, it performed well in the UK and Italy, and initially in the United States and Canada, with a final box office of $46.5 million for a film which had cost around $25 million to make. Critics were divided, but it has emerged over the decades as a cult classic, some taking it at face value as an enjoyably campy romp, others attributing more profound artistic merit to it. Its cultural footprint has been surprisingly durable, in no small part thanks to Queen’s outstanding soundtrack and the bravura or goofy brilliance of lines like “Flash, I love you, but we only have 14 hours to save the Earth!” and the inimitable expostulation of Brian Blessed as Prince Vultan: “Gordon’s alive?”
Whatever you think of the film, the tortuous story of its production encapsulates the paths not taken in cinema, the dizzying variety of what might have been. Fellini’s Flash Gordon would have been a world away from Lucas’s, or Roeg’s, or Leone’s, and different too from Mike Hodges’s eventual production. Dino De Laurentiis, the common factor, may have had a sense in his own mind of the film he wanted to create, but he needed the artistry and craft of a director to realise it, and he ranged widely across the spectrum before he found a partner who would get the job done.
Reality is contingent
It would be wrong to suggest that movie history is little more than an accumulation of chance occurrences, a kind of cinematographic Brownian motion in which film-makers have no agency. Some features are born of meticulous preparation and exhaustive planning, made by auteurs who can see every last detail in their mind’s eye before the cameras roll for a second. But showbusiness is very much that, a business, and commercial considerations jostle with dumb luck to play their part in the development of our most cherished cultural memories.
Ernest Borgnine in The Godfather? Al Pacino as Han Solo? Harrison Ford in Beverly Hills Cop? They could all have happened, and would now perhaps seem as predestined to us as the reality. When you watch a film, whether it is good or bad, with strong or weak performances, it is worth reflecting on the patchwork of coincidences which brought it into being. Nothing is inevitable until it happens.
