AVENGING THE AVENGERS

WHAT WAS STANLEY KUBRICK’S INDIRECT ROLE IN THE FAILURE OF A FILM BASED ON A BELOVED FRANCHISE?

- JAMES GOSS

THERE’S AN AVENGERS FILM STARRING Uma Thurman, Keeley Hawes, Fiona Shaw and Ralph Fiennes, with Sean Connery and Eddie Izzard as the villains. It has a score by Michael Kamen, and it’s only 115 minutes long. So why haven’t you seen this film? Because no one has.

“I know the Russos, they’re fantastic,” says its director, Jeremiah Chechik, with a weary chuckle. He’s long since come to terms with directing the other Avengers film, the one that you’ve never seen.

The 1998 film of The Avengers was based not on the Marvel comic book series but on the beloved and ever so British hit TV series. You may even think you’ve seen the film – but you really haven’t.

The project was the brainchild of legendary producer Jerry Weintraub (The Karate Kid, Ocean’s Eleven), then ruling Warner Bros. Weintraub bought the rights in 1987, and had a screenwriter working on it from 1993. “I’d written this absolutely mad script,” writer Don MacPherson recalled. “Jerry was very relaxed. He never felt he had to change the script in order to get people to commit.” Macpherson said his version of the film was greenlit during his first meeting, when Weintraub turned to two Warner Bros. execs: “‘Are we doin’ it or not?’ They looked at each other, put their thumbs up and that was that.”

“Jerry Weintraub was a thousand pound gorilla,” recalls Jeremiah Chechik, hopefully in a non-literal sense. “I was given the opportunity to undertake an unrequited romantic, surreal art movie at a reasonable budget. I felt very protected.”