[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.
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