Setting the Record Straight: Yikes! I had nothing to do with the ending of that Werewolf movie, nor the beginning (all that stupid bungee shit). Almost nothing of my script is on the screen. Believe me, that's not my work on the screen and I disavow it totally. It went through 12 rewrites after Tim and I and only the vague premise and some basic scene ideas remain. The characters were changed as well as everything else- all for the worse. I thought the movie sucked out loud. -Tom J. Stern

READ TOM AND TIM'S ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY HERE!

AN AMERICAN WERWOLF IN PARIS

The American Werewolf That Wasn't

(pg. 24 FANGORIA #134, July 1994)

Considering what advancements in computer FX have done for cinematic dinosaurs, it was only a matter of time before digital technology came into into play for werewolves. The project that might have spearheaded this advance was An American Werewolf in Paris, the long-mooted sequel that's finally a go at Propaganda Films (without original creator John Landis; see Fango #129). Yet writer Tom Stern's plans for a CGl-created monster have fallen by the wayside-just one of the casualties in a story that points up Hollywood's increasing obsession with commerce over art.

Stern was initially hired by Propaganda to direct as well as write (with his Freaked partner Tim Burns) the American Werewolf script, and took the opportunity to put his own spin on lycanthropic tradition. "It was a great challenge to do a sequel that didn't just repeat the original," he says. "I wanted to find a way to get around the basic werewolf storyline-it's always about a guy who's bitten hy a werewolf and starts turning into one, and he kills people and becomes upset by it, and he's usually killed at the end. In our script, that's the first act."

Stern and Burns' screenplay follows young American Andy McDermott, who's vacationing in Spain when he's called to Paris after his uncle is savaged by a mysterious beast there. Once he arrives, as Stern describes, "He's pulled into this nightmare by several characters who knew his uncle, and before you know it, he's deep into the Parisian werewolf experience."

As a result, of course, the innocent Andy winds up taking on the ancient curse, but the monster Stern came up with was decidedly new and improved. "I've always felt that the Achilles' heel of the werewolf genre is the fact that the monsters are sort of awkward-looking," he says. "They're always half-man and half-beast, and they don't look organic: they don't look like well-engineered predators. For that reason, the movies have fallen short of reaching into that primal fear that reminds us that we're prey, the sensation that Jaws or Alien gave us."

The writer sought to correct that mistake by developing what he describes as "a 100 percent killing machine, an awesome, huge, 600-pound werewolf. We decided to use the biggest, meanest predator on land as our model, so we designed our creature around lions and tigers, keeping the facial characteristics of a wolf." As part of the pre-production process, Stern had makeup FX artists Steve Johnson and Tony Gardner work on preliminary designs, but ultimately realized that computer enhancement would be required as well.

"The concept of a huge, quadruped werewolf could never be done before," he says. "There was no technology fhat would allow a creature like that to move in a realistic way. Obviously, since Jurassic Park everything's changed; I saw it when we were writing the script and said, 'Jesus, this is incredible.' This was going to allow us to have full shots of this awesome creature running at 30 miles an hour through the tunnels under Paris, tackling humans like gazelles. When we finished the script I went to Phil Tippett, who worked on Jurassic, and he said that he always wanted to do a werewolf movie. We were going to use CGI to bring the beast to life for full body shots while the closer stuff would be the makeup FX crew using animatronic heads."

Alas: the best-laid plans of wolves and men were not to see fruition. Once Stern turned in his and Burns' script, he got good news and bad news from Propaganda. The good news was that their work was strong enough to finally get the long-in-development project off the ground. The bad news was that it would no longer be doing so under Stern's guidance. "They were planning to do it on, a medium-low budget, around $10-12 million, and they felt comfortable with me directing it at that level," he reports. "Then when I handed it in, they liked it so much that they wanted to do it on a higher budget, and they needed a big-name director they could use the foreign presales, since Polygram, which owns Propaganda, is a foreign company." As a result, Marco Brambilla whose Demolition Man was a major international hit, was brought on to direct. According to Stern, Brambilla's approach will involve the traditional half-man, half-wolf look, with FX to reportedly be created by Amalgamated Dynamics.

"It's very upsetting to me," Stern laments. "When I write a script, I conceive every scene as a director, but now that power has been taken away from me, and I can't say how it's going to end up. It's ironic, because the only reason this movie's going is because we wrote a screenplay everybody loved, and the first thing they did to thank us was to kick me off the picture. They don't think about the creative aspects of the film they don't think, 'Is this the right guy to do this kind of movie?' They just think, well, we need somebody who's had a big hit." -Michael Gingold

(Photo: Courtesy XFX) Too bad this is the only place you'll ever see Steve Johnson and Bill Corso's ferociously impressive design for the American Werewolf in Paris.