Unmade Tales: ‘Lodestar’

Welcome to the first installment of “Unmade Tales,” a new series in which we’ll spotlight scripts by pro writers that, because of the vagaries of the film industry, are unmade, or, as Joe O’Brien, co-writer of Lodestar, this article’s focus, says, “have yet to be made.”

These scripts are passion projects, personal efforts, scripts the writers just can’t stop thinking about, can’t seem to take out of their back pocket, maybe even scripts that have been around the block a few times, and scripts, too, that deserve to be brought to life on the big screen – to be read, yes, but also to be seen.

The unfortunate reality of the film industry as it exists today – and, really, since its inception – is that the vast majority of a screenwriter’s work will never see the light of day. The screenplays they write will only be read by a select few execs, reps, and maybe talent.

Lodestar co-writer David Hayter, estimates that he has forty or fifty projects that have never been made (some 4-5,000 pages, conservatively estimating), many of them owned by studios or production companies, but some, like Lodestar, that are passion projects written on spec.

While any novelist, poet, or playwright has projects in the digital drawer that may never see the light of day, there’s no other creative field in which the majority of a writer’s professional work is never seen by an audience. “Unmade Tales” is here to change that.

THE SCRIPT: LODESTAR

THE WRITERS:

Joe O’Brien – writer, director, producer (Devil’s Mile, Robocop: Prime Directives)

David Hayter – writer, director, producer, actor (X-Men, Watchmen, Warrior Nun), famously the voice of Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid video game series.

THE LOGLINE: When popular superhero sci-fi series “Lodestar” is canceled, the star and his sidekick take new designer drugs named after their TV alter egos and go on a hallucinatory quest (or is it a drug-fueled rampage?) to save the series.

THE PITCH: Think Bojack Horseman meets Galaxy Quest meets Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, with a dash of The Boys thrown in for good measure. You can practically see a Ralph Steadman-style movie poster. The script is savagely, darkly hilarious, at once skewering the politics of the film industry with a scathing self-awareness and delivering an action-comedy that pulls no punches – and even makes us feel a little something for our heroes along the way.

THE GENESIS: “Lodestar is my homage to Terry Gilliam,” cowriter David Hayter says. But the incipient idea for the script came to O’Brien, Hayter and mutual friend Mark Opauszky and grew out of their fascination with the behind-the-scenes bacchanal of the 1960s “Batman” series.

It was an open secret that Adam West, Burt Ward, and the illustrious cast of the very family-oriented television series partied hard. And it was out of that juxtaposition – a family-oriented series with a cast behaving badly behind the scenes – that O’Brien says, they “extrapolated into…what is the life of that character?” An actor like Adam West locked into a defining role, “locked into a piece of art that you don’t necessarily respect,” says Hayter.

The project started small, with the idea that Hayter, an accomplished actor in his own right, could star. But as the script developed, it grew bigger and more expensive, and they realized they’d need a star (Nicolas Cage has been mentioned) to garner the budget for “proper costumes, the car, the effects…the weird surreality of it.”

O’Brien and Hayter both hail from Toronto and connected on the production of horror film Devil’s Mile. O’Brien devised a structural document with Mark Opauszky. Hayter ran with it, putting more of the pieces into place, and O’Brien wrote the initial draft.

Hayter says, “The best movies are about allowing people a vision of places they’re not allowed to go.” Hollywood, says Hayter, “is so insular” in terms of the way things work. He and O’Brien saw an opportunity to at once give audiences a glimpse at the inside baseball and skewer not just executives and talent and the politics at play, but the whole film industry – with affection. “Everybody’s kinda up in their own bullshit,” says O’Brien. But, says Hayter, “they’re all doing it because they love the business.”

Hayter draws on his own experience in that business, having written three of the seminal films of the superhero era – X-Men, X2: X-Men United, and Watchmen – and voiced superhero characters like Captain America in animated series and video games. “It just happened…not by choice. But I was very happy that my particular genre became enormously profitable.”

Hayter also says the protagonist, the titular “Lodestar,” (aka Damon Hamblin), is partly inspired by a friend (who will remain unnamed), the star of a popular series who simply could not stand his costar and yet endured for seven miserable seasons because, with season eight, he would make “life-changing money.”

In Lodestar, Damon Hamblin finds himself on the cusp of making that life-changing money when it all comes crumbling down with the series cancellation – and the drug-fueled adventure begins.

THE TRAJECTORY: O’Brien and Hayter have taken the project to numerous producers, including Gale Anne Hurd (The Terminator, Aliens), who loved the project. But the climate has changed with regard to big tentpole action-comedies, says O’Brien. “That space doesn’t really exist anymore.”

And as with so many projects, any momentum they mustered was derailed in part by the one-two punch of the pandemic and the writers and actors strikes. O’Brien says they pitched the project for streaming, and that “lit people up more…they could start to see it, but even then, streaming was starting to turn into a blockbuster business suddenly.”

They’ve also gone out to numerous actors, including Elijah Wood and Giancarlo Esposito, though they admit that the epic rap battle that serves as a centerpiece might scare off talent. Names like Nicolas Cage and Jared Leto have been mentioned for the leads. O’Brien says, “A few of these parts will require a certain degree of fearlessness.”

Hayter says that Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon are right in their book How to Make Movies for Fun and Profit – that Hollywood doesn’t want to make the same thing, only different. “Hollywood wants to make the same thing they’ve made before, again and again and again…”

But O’Brien and Hayter hold out hope that Lodestar will get made. Recently, Australian producer Jodea Bloomfield has come on board to champion the project and has even funded some of its visual development. O’Brien says, “Hollywood is weird and chaotic, and sometimes that works to your advantage…The ground is littered with unmade, brilliant scripts,” and all it takes is the right constellation of elements to come together.

Hayter circles back to Terry Gilliam, who struggled to get every movie he made off the ground. “They didn’t even want to release Brazil. Universal was going to shelve the whole thing because they just didn’t get it. And it ended up being one of the greatest movies of all time.” For Hayter, it’s these sort of “Don Quixote-style” attempts that “make Hollywood worth living in.”

Read Lodestar script excerpts courtesy of David Hayter and Joe O'Brien by clicking on the image gallery below:

Opening Pages and Rap Battle Sequence