Tales From Development Hell by David Hughes Page B

movie’s off! Dino’s gone bankrupt! He’s fired eighty people and they’re tearing down the sets as I look out the window.’”
    It was at this point, around 1987, that Shusett’s co-screenwriter Gary Goldman first encountered the project. “I was asked to do a polish,” says Goldman, who read the script, and liked it, but turned down the job because he had just started working with Dutch director Paul Verhoeven — fresh from his first Hollywood success, the sci-fi satire RoboCop — on his own project, coincidentally an out-of-body action film that Goldman co-wrote and was producing, entitled Warrior. “This was set up at Warner Brothers, and I wanted to work with Paul, whose work I had long admired, and who had just come off RoboCop, which I loved.” Although the pair worked together for several months, they were unable to reach a point where Verhoeven was ready to direct Warrior. In the meantime, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had been circling Total Recall since Swayze’s departure, learned that his Conan collaborator Dino De Laurentiis was in financial difficulties in Australia, and that the production had all but collapsed. Schwarzenegger called De Laurentiis and asked if his company would sell the rights to Dick’s story. When De Laurentiis agreed, Schwarzenegger called Carolco co-owners Andrew G. Vajna and Mario Kassar, for whom the actor had made Red Heat, and suggested that they buy it. The asking price: $3 million. Says Schwarzenegger, “Within a few hours, they owned the movie.” Next, Schwarzenegger claims to have cornered Dutch director Paul Verhoeven at lunch, and insisted he take a look at Total Recall.
    Incredibly, Verhoeven was the director Ron Shusett had originally had in mind when he was trying to set the film up at Disney: “In 1981, eight years before I got the movie financed, I wanted Paul to direct it,” he reveals. “I’d just seen Soldier of Orange, and I said, ‘That’s the guy I want.’ His agent said she gave him the script, but that he doesn’t like science fiction. Then, about seven years later, he fell in love with science fiction and made RoboCop.” When Verhoeven did eventually read the script, Shusett recalls, “he didn’t even have to finish reading it before he had committed to it. He said he’d got as far as the scene in the hotel where Edgemar says, ‘You’re not really here, you’re asleep in the chair at Rekall,’ closed the script, called his agent, called Schwarzenegger, and said, ‘I’m in!’” Adds Goldman, “I told Paul the ironic story that I had turned down the chance to re-write Total Recall in order to work with him. He asked my opinion of the screenplay. I told him. He saidthat we saw it the same way, and that he would try to get me the job to rewrite it. And he did.”
    By this time, there had been dozens of drafts — Verhoeven remembers “about thirty” — variously credited to Shusett and O’Bannon, Shusett and Star Trek: The Motion Picture screenwriter Jon Povill, and Shusett and Steven Pressfield (Freejack). Goldman says that Verhoeven read them all, and sent him the ones he wanted Goldman to read. “The story of the first half was almost exactly as it is in the movie,” he explains, “but there was general agreement that the second half of the movie wasn’t working — that is, everything after the Dr Edgemar scene. I had to adjust everything in order to make the second half work adequately. I also had to reconfigure the movie to fit Arnold, [because] in the short story and in all previous drafts, Quaid was a mild-mannered guy who suddenly discovered that he was a high-powered secret agent.”
    According to Goldman, several fundamental decisions determined most of the changes. Firstly, Verhoeven wanted to make the movie as if Dr Edgemar might be telling the truth in the hotel room, so that from the point that Quaid undergoes the procedure at Rekall, everything you see is Quaid’s fantasy. “Everything we have seen before, in