Tai-Pan by James Clavell6/9/2023 Fleischer was set to direct a big-screen adaptation of James Clavell’s Tai-Pan for Swiss producer Georges-Alain Vuille, and he wanted Fraser to write the screenplay. In the late 1970s, Fraser was contacted by film director Richard Fleischer. George MacDonald Fraser is best-known as the author of The Flashman Papers, but he also had a prolific career as a screenwriter and his memoir The Light’s on at Signpost covers his time in the movie biz. I am, of course, referring to the big-screen adaptation of James Clavell’s epic bestseller Tai-Pan. The making of this film is a tale of titanic ambition, missed opportunities, horrendous luck, botched compromises and warring egos. I recently came across a film that is the equal to all of the above in terms of never-ending difficulty or, as we might say today, ‘development hell’. I’ve always had a fascination with the concept of a ‘difficult’ production – whether they be unmade films ( White Jazz), forgotten or considered-lost productions ( Where is Parsifal?and The Devil’s Crown), films that weren’t released until forty years after they were shot ( The Other Side of the Wind) or the downright bizarre, how-the-hell-did-that-get-made picture ( Bond director Terence Young’s cinematic love letter to Saddam Hussein is a notorious example of this genre).
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