For a limited time (until midnight Thursday PST), Michael D. Sellers’ book about the making of the giant flop John Carter is free in the Kindle format. I can’t wait to read it. I hope it’s as fun as Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy: The Anatomy Of A Hollywood Fiasco, about the disastrous story of making Bonfire of the Vanities into a movie.
It took 100 years to bring Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars to the big screen. It took Disney Studios just ten days to declare the film a flop and lock it away in the Disney vaults. How did this project, despite its quarter-billion dollar budget, the brilliance of director Andrew Stanton, and the creative talents of legendary Pixar Studios, become a calamity of historic proportions?Michael Sellers, a filmmaker and Hollywood insider himself, saw the disaster approaching and fought to save the project – but without success. In John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood, Sellers details every blunder and betrayal that led to the doom of the motion picture – and that left countless Hollywood careers in the wreckage.
John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood examines every aspect of Andrew Stanton’s adaptation and Disney’s marketing campaign and seeks to answer the question: What went wrong? it includes a history of Hollywood’s 100 year effort to bring the film to the screen, and examines the global fan movement spawned by the film.
John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood
(Thanks, Sparky Santos on BB G+!)