10 Pitched Movies Hollywood Wasn't Ready For

5. Orson Welles' Heart Of Darkness

Joseph Conrad's legendary 1899 novella Heart of Darkness was adapted into a 1938 radio play by Orson Welles, who also intended to film it as his directorial debut.

Welles' plan was to shoot the entire project from a POV perspective, using roughly 165 panning shots to create a hypnotic rendering of protagonist Charles Marlow - to be played by Welles himself - as he ventured into the African jungle (which would be filmed on location).

Studio RKO eventually passed on the project after calculating the costs and impracticalities of Welles' vision, and it was almost a further 40 years before Francis Ford Coppola loosely adapted Conrad's novella into Apocalypse Now, almost killing himself and Martin Sheen in the process.

Welles moved on and instead debuted with the statuesque Citizen Kane, so it's tough to feel too bad for him, even if the ambition of the project sure would've made it something to see.

All the same, it's easy to appreciate why the studio heads of the early 1940s wouldn't greenlight such an avant garde project.

Yet by the time the 1970s rolled around, boundary-pushing filmmakers like Coppola and Werner Herzog were busy leading the charge on almost impossibly complex cinematic odysseys filmed in hellishly impractical locations.