PINHEAD STOLE MY STORY
Screenwriter Neal Marshall Stevens tells Fangoria a little about his involvement, or non-involvement, in the forthcoming ‘Hellraiser : Deader’.
‘Honestly, I was never involved with it,’ he tells the site. ‘Yes, the film is based on an old Stevens script, but that didnt have anything to do with Clive Barkers creation. Several years ago, I wrote an original spec screenplay called simply DEADER, which had absolutely no connection whatsoever to the HELLRAISER films or mythology,’ he explains. ‘Dimension bought it for a pretty substantial sum. It was in development there for a year and a half. Theyd brought on a director [commercials veteran Jim Sonzero] at one point and I worked with him on a draft, again with an eye toward it being a [stand-alone] feature. And then, for whatever reasonand it was never made clear, so far as I can tell, to anybody[studio chief] Bob Weinstein simply went cold on the project and it went into hibernation.’
The writer says he tried to get it back at one point. ‘We were trying to get it back from them for a while, but Dimension was neither willing to make the movie nor to put it into turnaround, that is, consider the possibility of having some other studio buy out the project and let us make it somewhere else. Instead, they turned it into a direct-to-video HELLRAISER sequel, with the cost of the screenplay probably being the single most expensive item in the entire budget. Which, believe me, is never the way percentages of screenplay to budget usually lay out.’
Tim Day apparently reworked the script as a Hellraiser sequel, says the scribe. ‘HELLRAISER: DEADER has been complete for quite some time now, but I havent seen it. Dimension hasnt sent me a screening copy. Last time I heard, and that was simply by way of on-line rumors, it isnt going to come out until next yearif then. So Im in the same boat with everybody else in terms of finding out what the end result is.’
Dimension actually have two new ‘Hellraiser’ sequels due out shortly.
Courtesy of MovieHole
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