“Untitled 1980s Coming-Of-Age Project”
It’s clear by this point that Field’s office is crammed with scripts and treatments that will never see the light of the day, and this likely includes one of the first screenplays he wrote about his own coming of age in the ‘80s.
“I wrote a script that is fairly autobiographical about when I was about sixteen. It was the second feature script that I wrote. I wrote another one a very long time ago, which I’m fairly certain I’ll never make. But that one I will,” he told Groucho Reviews in 2006.
“Well, when I wrote it, I wrote it for Stacey Snider right out of film school when she was running TriStar,” he continued. “And I never sent it to her because I gave it to my then-lit agent who didn’t read it for about eight weeks and then called me up and said, ‘1980 isn’t a period.’ And I said, ‘Well, it is for me. That was my childhood.’ And she said, ‘No, that’s not really a period. And this is a coming-of-age story, right?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And she said, ‘Well, let me send you some writing examples.’ And then she sent me all these sort of like goofy coming-of-age stories. And I’m so depressed I waited eight weeks for someone to read it that I just put it on the shelf, and I never showed it to anyone except for my wife. And I kind of decided then that I’d probably wait until I was about fifty to make it. Because then 1980 will really feel like a period, you know?”
Well, Field is now approaching 60, so who knows, perhaps he’ll take another look at it. Though maybe at this point, it has too much crossover with his unmade ‘Battered Bastards’ movie.
“Untitled Bowe Bergdahl Project”
It seems whenever Hollywood has multiple competing projects about the same topic, they either don’t get made or the results are forgettable.
At any rate, in 2014, everyone has eager to make a movie about Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier who spent five years in captivity after being captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan. He was freed in exchange for five Taliban fighters, causing a political uproar.
“Zero Dark Thirty” pair Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal had Megan Ellison’s Annapurna backing their take on the story, while Field was over at Fox Searchlight, who had acquired the rights to “America’s Last Prisoner Of War,” an article by late Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings about Bergdahl.
In any event, in 2017, Bergdahl pled guilty to charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy and was dishonorably discharged as part of the sentence, which he is now in the process of appealing.
All this to say, the story is complex, but public interest seems to have moved on, and I would imagine so, too, has any thoughts of turning this into a film.
“Purity”
Aside from this early attempt at turning “Little Children” into a series, Field hasn’t really gone for television, and yet, this might be the most heartbreaking of the projects that didn’t happen.
Set up at Showtime, with Daniel Craig starring, and twenty episodes ordered, the adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s book told the story of a young, idealist woman named Pip Tyler, who falls into a relationship with German activist Andreas Wolf (to be played by Craig), with the tale taking the characters around the world, with plenty of sex and intrigue to spice things up.
The project was a massive undertaking with a big commitment from Craig, but the network eventually balked.
“We wrote 2,000 pages for that series, and that project was set up at Showtime, which, at that point in time, was still a cable television company,” Field recently told The New York Times. “What we were proposing to them was, ‘Use this as a way to go through the door that is inevitable for you, into a streaming service. You need to do something that’s big and has some sweep to it.’ But yes, it was large and ambitious, and they didn’t ultimately have the belly for it.”
Oof, all that work for no payoff has got to hurt. But Field is philosophical about it, which makes sense, given he’s spent more of his career developing projects than shooting them.
“It’s kind of like, how can some actors audition and give everything for a part and not get it — how do they let it go and start all over again? I know some absolutely extraordinary actors who simply were not built to handle the rejection of auditions, but that’s part of this process,” he said. “You have to believe every time that there will be light at the end of that when it’s very, very likely there won’t be.”
There you have it, but there are a few more we couldn’t dig up information on. One that’s really sticking between my teeth is “Eastside Westside,” a film that Field was going to produce alongside William Teitler and Charles Weinstock, with a script by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright (who co-wrote “What Maisie Knew”) but about which even my Google powers couldn’t drum up a lick more information.
Then there are a couple of mysterious original scripts that Field tooled around with. While doing the awards season rounds for “Little Children” in 2006, the filmmaker told Variety that his next movie was “an original script, but I really don’t know what it’s about yet because I haven’t finished writing it.”
Almost exactly a full year later, it was reported that Media Rights Capital was repping “the next, currently untitled film” from Todd Field, but with no other details. Was it the same one he mentioned to Variety? It’s a mystery.
But thankfully, and hopefully, we won’t be waiting too long for Field to get back to work. This summer, it was announced he’s lined up to direct Hulu’s television series adaptation of Erik Larson’s excellent book “The Devil In The White City,” which has its own tortured history of spending years in development as a potential Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio joint. In this case, Field will be working with star Keanu Reeves to tell the story of architect Daniel H. Burnham, who is trying to make a name for himself at the Chicago World’s Fair. Little does he, or the general public, know, H.H. Holmes is also making a name for himself just outside of the World’s Fair where he runs a hotel and is murdering his clients. Fingers crossed, this 8-episode series makes it into production.
“TÁR” is currently playing at the New York Film Festival, opens in limited release this Friday, October 7, and then goes nationwide on October 28. Below is my conversation with Field.
