8. Terry Gilliam's The Defective Detective
It's difficult to choose just one of Terry Gilliam's unrealised passion projects. The director had enough trouble getting his finished film Brazil into theatres thanks to studio intervention, and one of his most popular films isn't even directed by him: Lost In La Mancha is a documentary about the failure of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. He's trying to get that particular film back off the ground again...for the seventh time since the original collapsed during production in 2000. Meanwhile The Defective Detective appears to remain totally buried, despite the noir spoof having a reportedly great script written with Fisher King's Richard LaGravenese. Obviously it wouldn't have been a straight crime picture with the former Python at the helm, with the conceit being that the titular PI had to track down a missing girl...by travelling into her story books, entering various colourful fantasy worlds. Never gonna happen because, well, it's Gilliam.
Tom Baker
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Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
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