Losing Neverland

Years ago, when I used to read scripts for Cruise/Wagner Productions, I came across a screenplay called Neverland. It was kind of a modernizing of the Peter Pan legend, setting it in the world of Manhattan junkies and low-level criminals. In Neverland, Peter Pan was now a dope fiend, addicted to and occasionally selling a powerful narcotic called...

Well, why not guess. Ten seconds...

If you said the drug was called "fairy dust," congratulations. You might have the makings of a complete hack!

Anyway, Peter eventually brought into his crew ("The Lost Boys") an innocent young runaway ("Wendy"), who joined him in evading the cruel detective who lost his hand the previous year while pursuing Peter. Yeah, it was lame.

I wondered, at the time, why anyone would even attempt something like this. Adapting a really famous story into a modern context like this creates numerous problems. Sometimes, the material is just an awkward fit for a modern setting (particularly Tiger Lily, who in Neverland was an exotic dancer/informant). Also, your audience already knows the outline of the story, so it's hard to build suspense.

I understand that the Peter Pan allusion was the guy's hook (har!), and without that there was nothing compelling about yet another witless, gritty riff on Drugstore Cowboy. But if you want to write a story about cops and junkies, just write that story. If you want to write Peter Pan, write that story. But don't mix stuff that just doesn't mix. It never works.

Which brings me to this item from Ain't It Cool News today. Here's Garden State-lovin' Quint with all the details:

This one concerns a film called PAN, which is a sort of bizarro world take on the Peter Pan legend, where Hook is a cop hunting down a psychopathic villain with the supernatural powers of Pan. New Line has picked up this pitch by Ben Magid. I don't know more than that, but that sounds pretty effin' cool to me.

Effin' cool, eh? This new concept, Pan, is not at all like Neverland, really. It turns the Peter Pan story into a serial killer riff, with Pan as the psycho and Hook as the protagonist cop. How peculiar.

I guess that gets around the second problem I mentioned...Audiences won't really know the story in advance if it turns it around enough to make Captain Hook the hero. Hopefully, Magid will dispense with the tired, racist Tiger Lily storyline altogether (unless that actress from The New World has a spot open in her schedule, in which case she can be the coroner or something.)

The first problem, that Peter Pan remains an odd fit for a modern story, remains a considerable obstacle to writing a good movie. How can you turn Peter Pan into a serial murderer and still make it Peter Pan? Is Neverland now the nickname for his Basement torture chamber? When Peter asks Wendy to fly, is that really just code for rubbing the lotion on its skin and then putting it in the basket?

And I don't even want to know what will become of Tinkerbell in this new adaptation. Schizophrenic hallucination urging Peter to kill? Murder victim #1? Sassy female rookie cop? Guess I'll have to just watch the movie when it gets made, which should be a few months after never in a million years.