[If there's one subject that holds more fascination for film geeks than the movies they've seen or are planning to see, it may be the movies that have not been made and may never will be: the scripts that go into permanent turnaround or excite some interest, only to be abandoned. A few of these attain the status of legends, a process that in the last several years has been exacerbated by the ability to disseminate them through the Internet. Because a screenplay is a physical object but also a blueprint for something fuller and richer, which would probably end up deviating from the script at any number of key points, reviewing unfilmed scripts is a movie critic's form of cryptozoology, kind of like examining a muddy footprint and trying to sketch Bigfoot from it. This week, the Screengrab looks at Fashion Beast.]

In the 1980s, the world was very different from the place we know now. The Cold War was still raging, MTV showed music videos, O. J. Simpson,Robert Blake, and George W. Bush were regarded as likable or at least harmless, and Alan Moore, the prolific, unpredictable magus of the comics scene, thought that there might be a place for his visions on movie screens. Although Moore seems never to have seriously considered adapting his own comics to movies, regarding them as having been carefully conceived for the medium in which they had aleady appeared, he didn't initially object to other people having a go at it, and on one known occasion, he even tried writing a movie himself. This was Fashion Beast, which is credited as having been written by More "from a story by Robert Boykin, Malcolm McLaren, and Alan Moore." I wouldn't know who Robert Boykin was if he sat in my lap, but McLaren is the Malcolm McLaren, the pop impresario who helped create punk as the manager-svengali of the Sex Pistols, as well as the man behind Bow Wow Wow and his-own-sort-of albums, fashion shops, and more recently, one of the producers of Richard Linklater's well-meaning flop Fast Food Nation. It was McLaren who asked Moore to take a stab at writing the script, and in interviews, Moore has indicated he agreed to do it partly for the experience of seeing if he could master the form and partly because he didn't feel it was his place to say no to a famous self-starter who has worked with a great many talented people, any number of whom would love to see him gunned down in the street. Moore also maintained a philosophical attitude about the fact that the movie never got made, which may be our first clue that he didn't pour his heart and soul into it.

Much of what Moore did pour into Fashion Beast is what he was pouring into his other work at the time, this time in scrambled form: an interest in street life and youth culture, an obsession with masks and questions of identity, an awareness of classic fantasy literature, and a persistent hang-up about the threat of nuclear war and the sound of jackboots on the sidewalk outside. The set-up is supposed to be an updated take on Beauty and the Beast set in Moore's baroque version of the fashion world. The heroine is "Doll Seguin", introduced as "a masculine figure in T-short and jeans"; she's a girl whose fashionable androgyny is carried so far that, in a twist on the more traditional Crying Game-style switcheroo, we are first meant to take her for a transvestite. Her opposite number is Jonni, a boy with "a feminine figure." Both are trying to maintain their fabulousness while scraping by in a scary, overpriced world when Doll, through wacky happenstance, becomes the star model for Celestine, a rich, successful, revolutionary designer who spends every minute of his life hiding out in the lair above his salon, sketching designs and shuttling messages to his snooty, hateful underseers, Madame D. and Madame S.

Celestine is the story's Beast, a master of beauty who has shut himself away from the world to spare it the sight of his grotesque physical ugliness. The really big switcheroo in the script is that Celestine isn't ugly at all; when Doll finally confronts him and sees his face, she discovers that he's actually quite beautiful. It turns out that his mother drilled it into his head that he was too hideous-looking to be allowed out into the sunlight, because she wanted him to grow up to be a great fashion designer, and this was the best way she knew how to do it. (I don't claim to be able to follow her logic, but based on the results, she could probably have given Todd Marinovich's father some pointers.) But Jonni, who works for Celestine, sees his master's designs as repressive and restrictive: as his loathing of his own body grows greater and greater, Celestine has taken to swaddling his models in more and more layers of clothing, as if to make actual physical contact between two human beings harder to pull off than ever. Jonni himself hopes to achieve fame as a designer whose work will celebrate the body by leaving it as little of it to the imagination as possible.

Fashion Beast is full of echoes of Moore's earlier work, and some of his later work, too. The spunky young heroine Doll is cut from the same cloth as Halo Jones and Evey from V for Vendetta, and the drumbeats-of-war backdrop is never really integrated into what's up front; it just seems to be there because the script was written at a time when Moore couldn't get the nuclear clock out of his mind. Moore's visual imagination transfers better here than his dramatic sense or his feeling for character. The surreal fashion world, all glitter and smiles up front and all back biting and grubby manual labor backstage, is fully realized, as are some of the details from the scenes of workaday life: you can feel how much fun the writer is having when Doll, not yet elevated to the status of model and muse, is in change of a coat-check room and keeps up a running commentary on what's coming across her counter. But when Jonni wants Doll, and us, to appreciate the beauty (and political meaning) of common life, his speeches recall such Thatcher-era placard-fests as Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Moore could get away with a certain percentage of his lectures and monologues in comics being pure gas, because the reader could speed-read or just skip some of the word balloons, but imagining it in a movie, you can practically hear the projector choking on the overflow of words. When Celestine himself checks out of the movie early, you know that Moore had gotten too carried away with his own conceits to think about how this was actually going to play. A virtuoso director might have made something visually audacious out of this, but I'm not sure that the actors would have been able to make their roles breathe. The final product suggests a shallow but ambitious mixture of futuristic dazzle and sour cattiness: Speed Racer meets Ugly Betty.