10. To The White Sea
Joel and Ethan Coen wrote a second-draft screenplay of novelist/poet/alcoholic James Dickeys narrative of surviving the war in the Pacific. While their scripts were original up to the point of remaking THE LADYKILLERS (2004) and adapting Cormac McCarthy (see below), their first adaptation was intended to be Dickeys savage epic that echoed the misanthropy of his earlier DELIVERANCE (where, as Jim Goad points out in The Redneck Manifesto, the author repaid the mountain men who, in real life, saved him from drowning by depicting their brethren as hillbilly rapists). The part of Sgt Muldrow, the tail gunner shot down over Tokyo in the 1945 fire bombings, was won by Brad Pitt. Opening with the characters introductory monologue from the novel, the Coens reduced the sparse dialogue from an earlier version of the script (by David Webb Peoples and Janet Peoples, screenwriters of TWELVE MONKEYS, 1995) to zero for most of the rest of the film. Muldrow was to walk determinedly, silently home through Asia to the Bering Straits killing with cold, desperate deliberation throughout to keep himself alive. Shooting was scheduled to being in 1998, until the Coens realised the studio was not going to raise the $80 million budget (a record for them). As Joel said, dont set a movie in Tokyo during the firebombing unless you have lots of money to pay for it... was the lesson we took away from that. Not even the presence of a major Hollywood star could assuage the accountants feeling that they were taking a major risk with a near-silent epic of existential violence. Pitt offered more box office-bait than Martin Sheen had when he signed up to replace Harvey Keitel in APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) but Muldrows focused ruthlessness recalled the final terminations spree of Sheen as Capt Willard, most of which was cut from the final print for making his character unsympathetic and remains unrestored, even in the Redux print. (Pitt later showed loyalty to the Coens by camping it up and getting comically killed in BURN AFTER READING.) Gunner Pitt finally makes it to the end of the war in FURY (2014).