Journey to the Center of the Earth - the lost version

In 1987, movie magazines previewed a lavish and very offbeat version of Journey to the Center of the Earth, written and directed by Rusty Lemorande (writer of Electric Dreams, co-writer of Captain Eo, and producer of Yentl). The talent assembled for the project was impressive: the cinematographer was David Watkin (Return to Oz, Out of Africa); the production design was by Geoffrey Kirkland (Children of Men,Captain Eo,  Doctor Who (1966-67)); and supervising the creature effects was Laine Liska (who worked on the Star Wars cantina and animated the bee in  Honey, I Shrunk the Kids). Also involved was visual  effects supervisor John Scheele (who who has done a lot of innovative work: on The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, he  oversaw the  depiction of the  eighth dimension. He also worked on Tron and Disney's 3-D short Magic Journeys).

The publicity was enticing: photos showcased Kirkland's beautiful and fantastical cave sets, and articles described  Lemorande's highly-creative scenarios. However, what finally came out--directly to video--in 1989 was roughly assembled footage that, after about 20 minutes, abruptly segued into an entirely different, Albert Pyun-directed film. So abrupt was this transition  that some of Lemorande's  characters dropped out of the story. The project that Lemorande undertook had, in fact, fallen apart well before its unveiling in fanzines.

Pre-production art of an underground civilization by Geoffrey Kirkland (courtesy of the artist)

As scripted, Lemorande's film concerns two teenage brothers (played by Ilan Michell-Smith of Weird Science and Paul Carafotes of Scriptfellas. The latter beat Jim Carrey to the role)  and their seven-year-old sister Sarah (Jaclyn Bernstein, who appeared in the "Children's Zoo" episode of the 1985 Twilight Zone revival and in A Very Brady Christmas as Marcia nee Brady's daughter) who explore a dormant volcano in Hawaii. Reluctantly accompanying them is Crystina (Nicola Cowper of Dreamchild) and a dog (played by Chopper) who Crystina is “babysitting.”  An earthquake traps the group inside the volcano, and their quest for a way out takes them  to bioluminescent  caverns, an underground  petrified forest, a “dinosaur graveyard,” and encounters with snake-sized worms, much larger worms that nearly devour a protagonist,  and “underground crabs.”

Eventually, they encounter the very odd Professor Nimrod (comedian Emo Philips) and his mole-mobile, a modified Volkswagen equipped with argon lasers and vintage TV sets, used as navigation monitors. Nimrod is trying to find his lost grandmother,  explorer Agnes Saknussen. (Hermione Gingold of Gigi was supposed to play this part, but it is uncertain if her scenes were ever filmed.)

While resting in an upside-down cavern, the explorers encounter several nine-foot-tall, green-eyed creatures that emit sounds like  "beautiful reed pipes."  Our protagonists are led to a levitating rock slab, which transports them to a subterranean civilization, "a vision like something out of Things to Come only etched in stone." It is a city created with sound--whereas our world is based on vision and light. It is a wondrous place: the walls are adorned with a combination of hieroglyphics and bar code, and there is a museum of souvenirs from the earth's surface, including vintage Pepsi bottles, mid-century McDonald's wrappers, ancient coins, and skeletons adorned in spelunker suits from various eras.

These creatures, in order to save themselves from humanity's toxic sounds and poisoning of oceans, plan to create four volcanoes to destroy the earth's ice caps—and thus humankind. However, if a "lost voice" can be found, they could instead escape human pollution by burrowing further into the earth.

By various accounts, most of this story was filmed as written, with some inserts and reshoots needed as well as post-production work. However, the production went way over budget at a time when the financier , Cannon Films, was already having serious money problems.  (It was at this time that Cannon's Spider-Man movie had to be greatly scaled down and eventually abandoned altogether.)

Some crew members pointed to first-time director Rusty Lemorande's slowness as the movie's undoing--Lemorande himself said he shot far too much footage. Brett White, an assistant to Laine Liska, concurred that the production dragged on but was unsure who ultimately was at fault. "The producers were there all the time, and I don't know what was going on, but nobody was pushing him [Lemorande] to finish this project,” he recalled. “He needed somebody to say, 'You need to shoot an 'x' amount of footage per day and get it done.' That project just went on for months and months. There was no organization.”

However, art director Craig Stern believed that people did not understand and support Lemorande's unorthodox directing methods. The filmmaker set out to employ principals of non-linear filmmaking, an approach George Lucas  later implemented on the Star Wars prequels. One example, in “Journey,” was an attempt to achieve as many effects in-camera as possible rather than wait for post-production. Production designer Geoffrey Kirkland, who enjoyed working with the director,  remembered suggesting Introvision, which inspired Lemorande to research the Shuftan process used in Metropolis (1927). Thus, various cave sets were to be enlarged via on-set glass paintings and miniatures, but if the shots did not work, they could be redone in post-production.

Other types of old-fashioned on-set effects were implemented as well. For traveling interiors of the mole-mobile, actor Paul Carafotes recalled that "the car would be rocked, it would move a short distance, [but] the walls [outside] would spin." (He told me this in Cinefantastique Online circa 2002.)

Design for Volkswagen-turned-mole-mobile (courtesy of Rusty Lemorande)

The production was complicated in many other ways. Among Kirkland's elaborate sets was an upside-down cavern. In Lemorande's footage, the spelunkers sit around a campfire, with some reclining on the “ground” and others on a  wall. (This scene was pictured in Starlog #116.) "It was quite fun," recalled Carafotes. "Everything was built to look like it was upside-down, but it was right-side-up." While sitting around the campfire, the actors "had to be strapped in[to the ceiling].”

The script also called for numerous exotic inhabitants of inner earth, which were created by the late Laine Liska . Early in the story, young Sarah gets separated from the group while following a strange little creature called a Muckluck. This character was described by an  on-set reporter (Steve Biodrowski of Cinefantastique) as  “a darker, more athletic version of Gizmo, the friendly Mogwai in Gremlins.”  Liska made two different puppets of the Muckluck that met varying needs. “It was mostly [a] hand-puppet, and remote-controlled eyes, and ears, and things like that," recalled White. For more athletic action, the Muckluck was also a monkey in a suit.

Perhaps Liska's biggest undertaking was the nine-foot-tall creatures that resided in the underground city  (sometimes referred to in the script as “tall people”).  “They were [made with] PVC pipe with a lot of latex wrapped all over them,” explained White. “Laine designed them and sculpted the giant heads for them, and then Bret Alexander and Tom Gleason did the complex work: the cabling that was inside--they had glowing eyes.

"We had to put them on these stuntmen. We had basketball players for a while, but they gave up, they couldn't handle it.

"They got some good old pro stuntmen who were very good. One guy was in his fifties, and he had no problem getting in that suit and wearing it all day long. Those suits were fowl. You sweated the moment you got into them.”

Yet another creature, played by Yeardley Smith (who went on to do the voice of Lisa for The Simpsons),  was Totu, an outcast of the subterranean society and curator of the museum of human artifacts. "Her mom was human, and her father was one of the creatures,” explained White. “I think her mother was an explorer who was lost down there. Nancy Deturo (Killer Klowns from Outer Space) did the makeup on her."

Totu, played by Yeardley Smith (Lisa on The Simpsons)

Many other fantastic elements were intended  for post-production. At one point in the script,  Professor Nimrod's mole-mobile unexpectedly burrows into an underground ocean "with strange snakes and underwater shapes." The  craft produces a rudder and spotlights before being pursued by a giant "prehistoric fish with a bioluminescent sphere suspended from a bone over its head."  White enthusiastically recalled seeing a drawing of a "really cool fish creature," but a miniature was never made. However, “we did build a little tank in Laine's backyard, but nothing really happened. I think we were just going to stick a puppet underwater and hope for the best. That never went anywhere."

Other effects sequences would have involved the subterranean race (or “tall people”) manipulating rock with musical tones.  Before work on the movie ceased, there was discussion of using stop-motion animation to depict these transformations. As  White described to me for Cinefantastique Online:

"[The creatures] communicated through music, and they did the tunneling through music.  They would howl at the walls, and the walls would sort of morph into things. We did a stop-motion test on video tape that we put together real quickly. They turn around to howl at the walls, and they turn into a big, Hollywood Bowl-kind-of cathedral.  . . . We made stuff out of Styrofoam and wood and had foil wrapped all over it [painted like rock] with wires. Then we would pull the foil [via the wires] one frame at a time until it formed around that Styrofoam. We had a camera behind one of the stop motion creatures, and it was animated to look as if it was howling."

Although only one such test was done, White said  that “one of the stop-motion puppets that Laine made was fairly  detailed, so [stop-motion] was probably where they were going to go.”

Sadly, none of these plans were realized. Reportedly, Cannon executives Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus were displeased with the film's rough cut.  A person  involved in the project said that they did not like Emo Philips as the eccentric professor.

"Emo was fine,” said Carafotes  “but Emo is a comedian, so he was almost all performance. He wasn't really working with us. At that time he was this new outlandish comedian who [had] kind of a robotic delivery. His rhythms were completely different from the actors. Rusty, I think, got caught up in enjoying the performance, and he started giving Emo more and more stuff to do not having to do with the script."

(Golan and Globus may have had legitimate concerns regarding “Journey,” but various co-workers claim the duo's judgment was not always on target. According to people involved in their ill-fated Spider-Man movie, there was a lack of understanding of the comic book character (1). Consequently, one draft of the script involved a Spider-Man who literally was a spider. Another former employee claimed that Golan and Globus turned down the chance to make Back to the Future, and at a sneak preview of that film, they expected it to bomb.)

And so, rather than fund the completion of a concept fairly far along, director Albert Pyun (Captain America), who had wanted to adapt his own version of  Journey to the Center of the Earth,  got the go-ahead to take over, based on his  rather different interpretation, which did not necessarily belong in the same room as Lemorande's vision. (Pyun also directed Alien from L.A., another subterranean adventure, which arguably worked better because it was his movie from beginning to end.)

Pyun's new material was shot in Apartheid South Africa. The director  initially had  concerns about working in such a repressive society (as he related at the time to Cinefantastique's Kris Gilpin), but ultimately, he  found justification in filming there. Nicola Cowper returned for new scenes of Crystina, but other cast members, including Paul Carafotes did not.  "They wanted me to go down to South Africa and reshoot, and I wouldn't go,” Carafotes recalled. So, in the final film, some characters abruptly leave the story part-way through.

In addition to reinventing the film's final three-quarters, Pyun evidently provided new material for the beginning, in where  Crystina, already experiencing difficulty as a nanny, gets hired by an eccentric rock star to babysit his dog. None of this back story is in Lemorande's  script.

In the final Pyun-edited film, Yeardley Smith's character of Totu and Emo Philips's Professor Nimrod are seen almost subliminally in a Pyun-contrived dream sequence. Liska's nine-foot-tall creatures are also reduced to fleeting cameo appearances, and largely in outtakes. "[Y]ou can see the studio ceiling and stuff like that [behind them],” laughed White. “It was pretty bizarre that with all the footage that they shot of them that they didn't come up with something that didn't show the top of the airplane hanger [laughs]." (Oddly, the cover art for the 2005 DVD release of “Journey” features these characters prominently as well as the Muckluck, which is totally absent in the final film.)

For Carafotes, the Lemorande project was not enjoyable, but he felt that its incompletion "was a shame because it was a very good idea, [and] they put a lot of money into the actual shooting of it."

"He [Lemorande] sure wanted to do this thing,” observed White. “It meant everything in the world to him. Even after Golan-Globus pulled the money, he was putting his own money into it, shooting little sequences .”

(1) Joseph Zito, who was hired to direct Cannon's Spider-Man movie, observed, “I don't think [Golan and Globus] knew for sure who Spider-Man was. I think they had this idea [that] the wolfman goes out and chases girls, and maybe Spider-Man is a spider that goes out and...[laughter]. It occurred to me that it would be a good idea to have Golan meet Stan Lee.” Zito also recalled that "it was such an unusual film for Cannon to be thinking about doing, and I think it was mostly because they didn't know what it was that they got involved in. I said to them, 'Listen, you cannot make this movie like any of your other movies. You must let me make this outside your system with completely different people. . . . I've been lucky with you guys before.' There was a beat of silence [laughs] as they absorbed the insult, then they said, 'Yes.'