I’ve been in a lot of discussions in the last month or so about the Green Lantern feature film that was released this summer. And since I’m one of those people who sits in the crossroads of comics and movies, I hear a lot from both sides of the reactions: film folk who consider it a mess and comics fans who are happy with just seeing GL up on the big screen.
For me personally, I’m not so deeply invested in the Green Lantern mythos that I can’t get some distance from it. Hal Jordan is “my” preferred GL, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the others. (Others? ask the general audience. Oh, yes, say I, others. Guy, and John, and Kyle, and Scott, not to mention the off-world ones.)
Several years ago, before the current Green Lantern film was even in pre-production, even before Geoff Johns had taken on writing the Green Lantern comic book, I had heard stories about the attempts at Warners to develop a GL feature script. I had heard that there had been something like 17 attempts at it. That’s probably 17 scripts the studio paid to have written. And apparently, none of them worked.
I thought about all the problems that would be inherent in making a GL film. Production costs for the special effects was one big stumbling block that I could see. I suspected that too many of those attempted scripts “went cosmic” (as I called it) early in the script, sending the production cost skyrocketing.
It also seemed to me that the studio would have to assume that the greater part of the movie audience would not be familiar with the Green Lantern character and mythos. So, a certain amount of exposition about these things would need to be done in the first film featuring the character. The audience would have to learn about the mythos along with the main character.
So, just for the fun of it, I decided to try my hand at writing a Green Lantern feature script. I wrote about a third of my intended plotline and then stopped. There were other projects I was working on that were more professionally useful.
But since the release of the GL film, I’ve seen a lot of discussion back and forth about the movie’s flaws. Well, argument, actually. So, even though this piece of writing was never intended for general exposure, I’m going to post it on my website now. Just so I can have a reference when I get into discussions about the GL film. I’ll be able to point to what I mean about what I think would have been better choices.
NOTICE: this is presented merely as a writing sample, and should be treated as being similar to fan-fiction. The characters (other than Stephanie Taylor, who is original to me) belong to DC Entertainment
