This is another one of those fish that got away stories, or more definitely a story of a story that got away. If you don't like those kind of stories, skip this.
F. Scott Fitzgerald penned a lovely, edgy, witty little ditty called The Curious Case of Benjamin Button during 1921 or so in which our protagonist (like Merlin the Magician) is born an old man who as he gets older becomes younger until finally his befuddled family must hide a pewling infant as, we imagine, he devolves into a sperm and ovum and then vanishes. It seemed a truly delicious way to dissect a lifetime and a milieu and a culture and humanity and how we relate to one another, by turning it all upsidedown.
Benjamin Button always seemed to me the perfect candidate for a movie adapation, but there were problems.
The main ones were that doing the special effects twenty-five years ago was no picnic. Getting a fellow to age backwards involved make-up and casting. You can age someone from, oh, their twenties to their nineties without much trouble. A few latex appliances, wigs and some grease paint, and there he is, an old man! It's the youth part that is diffcult. You must find a succession of teenagers, children and tots who bear a spitting resemblance to the starring actor as young guy. I recall the agonies of the casting director for Superman I hunting for someone to play Christopher Reeve as a teenager, child and infant. They had hundreds of casting photos all over the office and kept putting them up on the wall until they had a succession of boys who looked like they were the same person growing up. Then they had to be available, negotiated for, and quickly filmed before they grew yet more adolescent or less infantile.
The other problem was that no one in Hollywood liked the idea. Or, more accurately, they thought I was nuts. This never stops me: the list of films that I've wanted to make that no one liked but that got made anyway is awfully long now (Benjamin Button being the latest among projects that go all the way to Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf and Siddhartha which my agents all shook their heads at), so I've persisted all these years muttering and pleading until, at last, I realized that David Fincher, whom I've never met, was going to fulfill my dream.
David's got it easy. He has a track record for offbeat, if not downright weird movies, and he has the magic of CG special effects to back him up. It's simply a breeze in 2008 to make someone get younger and old: you just use the computer to map the face of the actor onto someone elses, tickele a few pixels and Voila! the aged or infantilized Benjamin Button. I envy him in the most respectful way. It's not that it's being handed to him on a silver platter, it's just that he was the right guy in the right place at the right time. And you can do a period drama with period locations without spending millions on building a 1922 city. I haven't checked to see if it is being done as a period drama of if he's updated it to the 21st Century. I'd have done it as a Jazz Age piece. There's something so appealing and appalling about that. Some of you, by now, already know what it is or if you're reading this after the release date, absolutely know, but I'm still curious and wondering.
Brad Pitt, of course, didn't exist when I wanted to do this. Heaven knows whom we would have cast way back when if someone in The Black Tower at Universal had said "Yes," but it wouldn't have been Brad. I'm sure he'll do a fine job, and surely bring in the audience or "an audience" of some sort, more than an unknown would to a film with an edgy, science fictiony premise like this one.
I look forward to it. Of course, I'll be sitting in the theater muttering under my breath and cursing fate once again. One of these days, I'll get to do the movies of the books that I've dreamt of for decades. Or not.
Are you guys with big bucks out there listening? I've got a BIG LIST of great projects and so far, I'm batting a thousand on which ones get financed, just not on when.
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