Star Trek's finest hour, David Lynch's masterpiece, and a gangster movie saved
by its star. More classic films were destined for the small screen than you might expect.
In 1995, Alicia Silverstone starred as cheery, upbeat fashionista Cher Horowitz in Clueless,
a razor-sharp satire of life at a Southern California high
school. Populated by a cast of lovable oddballs, Clueless became a pop culture
phenomenon and catapulted just about every member of its cast to stardom.
"Ugh, as if!"
But this movie wasn't always ticketed for big-screen success;
it was originally slated for TV. The film's writer
and director, Amy Heckerling, told Entertainment Weekly back in 1995:
"Originally, it wasn't called Clueless [...] When I first pitched it as a TV show,
it was called No Worries. 20th Century Fox said they wanted a
show about teenagers — but not the nerds. They wanted it to be about the cool kids."
According to Producer Twink Caplan though,
Fox wasn't sold on their pitch. In the same interview, Caplan told Entertainment Weekly:
"When we showed No Worries to Fox,
it was obvious they didn't get it. They thought the script needed more boys in it."
Apparently, nobody quite understood the premise of a positive, sunny teenager in the cynical,
grunge-obsessed early '90s. Eventually, however, Heckerling's concept landed in the hands of a
producer who loved it — and just so happened to have a movie deal with Paramount. Heckerling would
eventually get her TV series too, with Stacey Dash in a sitcom spin-off that ran for three seasons.
Director Rob Reiner is arguably one of Hollywood's most underrated creatives.
In addition to directing classics like The Princess Bride and Stand by Me, he also acts,
with memorable roles in everything from All in the Family to New Girl. However,
his most personal project might be the 2015 film Being Charlie, not just because he directed it,
but because it was the first film written by his son, Nick Reiner.
A semi-autobiographical story of a young man who lives in the shadow of his famous father,
the movie follows Charlie, a troubled teen whose struggles land him in rehab. According to Nick,
however, it wasn't always destined to be a movie, originally beginning life as a pilot
script for a half-hour comedy series. He developed the concept while he himself was
staying at a rehabilitation clinic, and it eventually morphed into a script for
a movie with the help of his father. In fact, the making of Being Charlie helped
heal a rift between the real-life father and son duo. Rob Reiner told ABC News in 2015:
"Over the course of making the film, our relationship definitely changed. It wasn't
terrible or anything, but it got better because I then understood a lot more of
what he had gone through and he understood a bit more of what I had gone through."
Arguably David Lynch's defining film, Mulholland Drive is a dark drama about
an aspiring actress who befriends a young woman suffering from amnesia.
A masterpiece of modern cinema, its mix of mystery, crime noir, abstract dreamscape,
and genuine horror made it not just one of Lynch's best, but a film many consider flawless.
"No hay banda! It is all… a tape."
Fans of the film might be surprised to learn it almost wasn't a movie at all,
as Mulholland Drive was originally dreamed up as a TV spin-off to another classic Lynch story.
Following the smash success of his prime time ABC thriller Twin Peaks, Lynch and co-creator
Mark Frost were preparing a second series centered on the character Audrey Horne,
which was to be named after a famous street in Los Angeles where Frost lived. In the
book Conversations with Mark Frost, the series' co-creator talked about how the
movie evolved from a TV pilot script to a feature-length big screen success. He wrote:
"We had considered spinning off the Audrey character and setting her loose in Hollywood,
in a modern noir. We had very preliminary talks;
it drifted away, and then six years later, I hear it's going be a pilot at ABC."
But when ABC passed on the project, Lynch reworked it into a single feature film with
an entirely new cast of characters — though Frost could only speculate as to why. He said:
"Maybe because Twin Peaks had crashed and burned [after its first season],
there wasn't much appetite for spinning off a series from it."
In the 1980s, science fiction saw a surge in popularity. The decade saw a number of classics
about monsters or aliens coming from outer space. At the same time, dystopian sci-fi stories about
futuristic lawmen were also in vogue. So, in 1988, the gritty sci-fi crime drama Alien Nation had the
idea to marry those two concepts, putting an alien in the role of a cop on the hunt for a killer.
The film starred James Caan as Matthew Sykes, an LAPD detective who is reluctantly partnered
with alien officer Sam Francisco. Even though Alien Nation turned out to be a relatively
well-received movie, its creator, Rockne S. O'Bannon, always had a TV series in mind.
After failing to get a development deal at a major studio, the project landed in the
lap of James Cameron and his partner Gale Anne Hurd, who, hot off the production for Aliens,
absolutely loved the concept. With a duo of Hollywood producing stars behind it, Bannon was
more than happy to reshape his TV series into a feature film. A year after the film was released,
of course, Bannon would finally get his wish when Alien Nation received a television spin-off.
With its tongue firmly planted in its rotting cheek, Zombieland is a wild satire of the horror
genre. With a big name cast that included an iconic cameo by Bill Murray, the movie became
a big box office hit and, for a time, was the highest-grossing zombie movie ever made.
"I avoided other people like they were zombies even before they were zombies.
Now that they are all zombies, I kinda miss people."
Before it landed in theaters, however, Zombieland was the brainchild of future
Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who were hoping to turn their
idea of a humorous zombie apocalypse into a TV series. In 2009, Reese told Gizmodo:
"We wrote it as a TV pilot and sold it to CBS. They had a lot of notes,
which we addressed. And then when they decided to not make the pilot
we unaddressed a lot of them. We went back to what we had."
Somewhere during the rewriting process, Reese and Wernick decided to turn their pilot script
into a movie screenplay instead. Years later, the duo got another shot at television and filmed an
episode for a spin-off as part of Amazon's 2014 pilot program. While reviewers had kind words,
the streaming service passed on turning it into a full series.
Some TV-to-movie evolutions come about when a producer feels an idea is too good to be
limited to the small screen. Others move their show to a feature film when a producer has
connections with a major movie studio. However, the 2020 gangster biopic Capone took a longer
and more complicated path: it took more than thirty years, two entirely different projects,
and the influence of Hollywood star Tom Hardy to get the movie made.
The journey began in the 1970s, with a TV pilot for a show called Cicero. The proposed series was
created by The Wild Bunch scribe, Walon Green. After decades in limbo, it was finally picked
up by Warner Bros. in 2010, by which time the script had evolved into a screenplay for a big
budget motion picture. A year later, Hardy signed on, with Harry Potter director David Yates slated
to helm the project. Things never fell into place, however, and the project was ultimately scrapped.
Despite this setback, Hardy had fallen so in love with the idea of playing Al Capone that he revived
the concept a few years later. Hardy sought the help of beleaguered director Josh Trank,
who, in turn, was looking for a comeback after years of controversy. Initially titled Fonzo,
the final result was the streaming original Capone.
The late 1990s and early 2000s were awash with teen horror films,
beginning with the wild success of 1996's Scream. Four years later, Final Destination
brought the trend into the new millennium, sparking its own franchise that saw a slew
of sequels over the next 11 years. The first told the story of an ill-fated airline flight
whose would-be passengers had been destined to die — but it was almost something else entirely.
Believe it or not, the premise of Final Destination was originally developed as a script
for The X-Files. The proposed episode, titled "Flight 180," was fairly similar to what ended
up on the big screen: a handful of passengers exit a doomed flight before take-off after one
of them has a fateful premonition, only for each of them to die one by one in other gruesome ways.
However, in this earlier version, the passenger who had the premonition of
the plane's ultimate destruction was Scully's brother, lending the story
some serious suspense as the two paranormal investigators raced against time to save him.
According to legend, however, writer Jeffrey Reddick never sent the network his script,
having been advised by a friend at New Line Cinema who felt the idea was far
too good to be confined to a single episode of an existing franchise.
The landmark TV series Star Trek dazzled audiences for three seasons in the 1960s,
before low ratings forced its cancellation. But when it got hot in reruns in the '70s,
talk of a revival surfaced, and a feature film seemed like the next logical step. While
audiences were eventually handed a big budget continuation in 1979, Star Trek: The Motion
Picture started out as a potential television relaunch under the title Star Trek: Phase II.
"Heading, sir?"
"Out there."
Developed as a potential flagship series for the launch of their own television network,
Paramount brought Trek creator Gene Roddenberry onboard and began assembling scripts, while
the studio re-signed the cast to return. Famously, actor Leonard Nimoy declined,
apparently due to tensions with the network over the sale of merchandise featuring
his likeness. Nevertheless, the remaining cast was hired, the sets were constructed,
and the new TV series was all set to go… when a little film from George Lucas landed in theaters.
After the success of Star Wars, Paramount pivoted to film. They used much of the work done for
Phase II, even repurposing its pilot script, while also settling their conflict with Nimoy,
who agreed to return as Spock. Remarkably, many of the original sets for Phase II continued to be
used on spin-off shows throughout the 1990s before being torn down after the conclusion
of Star Trek: Voyager, the series that had ultimately launched Paramount's TV network.
City of the Dead isn't the kind of movie you might expect from the title. Released in 1960,
the movie told the story of a mysterious town inn
that turns out to be controlled by a coven of sinister witches.
"Some men and some women, whose power came from the devil,
gathered beneath the Raven's Inn to perform a black mass in the honor of Lucifer."
Initially developed by screenwriter George Baxt as a television pilot, City of the Dead
was intended to be a starring vehicle for horror icon Boris Karloff. Having found little success
with the networks at the time, producer Milton Subotsky took it upon himself to fill out the
story with some new characters, and City of the Dead was born. Stateside, the film was
retitled Horror Hotel, and it remains a cult favorite of classic horror aficionados today.
A teen thriller film from the mid-1990s,
Cruel Intentions is a dark drama about a pair of friends who play a twisted game
with a celibate school friend. The movie was a modest hit that grew a fervent fan following,
so it made perfect sense that a sequel would follow. The result was Cruel Intentions 2,
a prequel set a few years earlier at a prestigious boarding school. It followed the exploits of a
twisted teen who moves to a new town and gets involved in some serious drama of his own.
Cruel Intentions 2 was released direct-to-video in 2000. It had a noticeably cheaper look and
feel than its predecessor, and a new cast of mostly unknowns. Viewers of the first film
who saw the sequel may have suspected what we all know now: the sequel was originally
filmed as a TV pilot. As it turns out, following the success of the first movie,
a spin-off prequel titled Manchester Prep was developed, and at least two episodes were filmed.
Unimpressed with the results, and concerned its envelope-pushing story might not play on
network TV, the studio scuttled the project. In an attempt to recoup their investment,
they chopped up the episodes and repackaged them as a direct-to-video feature.