Some old books have been found in vaults of the legendary Steve McQueen which contain notes and storyboarding for a film that was never completed. From Coming Soon:
Warner Bros. Pictures and producer David Heyman have set Paul Scheuring to script Yucatan, a heist film to be based on almost 1,700 pages of recently discovered notes and storyboards done by McQueen for a project he hoped to topline, reports Variety.
Sounds intruiging doesn’t it? A new story that McQueen was going to headline comes to light and they’ve assembled a team to create it. Hold on, that’s not what it says, here’s some more.
Scheuring, creator and executive producer of the upcoming Fox drama series Prison Break, has already begun writing a drama about a group of thieves who head to Mexico to find a treasure buried for centuries beneath the Yucatan peninsula.
The film will be executive produced by McQueen’s son Chad and godson Lance Sloane. The duo got the project started when they discovered in McQueen’s vault a couple of old trunks that contained 16 custom-made leather-bound books holding meticulous storyboards and notes.
Okay, so let’s spell this out. Scheuring was writing a script about thieves heading to Mexico to find buried treasure (Anyone heard that idea before?) and during that process the notes and storyboarding of McQueen were found.
There’s a few things that strike me here. That material must be further than just notes if it includes a storyboarding process, and especially at multiple books and 1,700 pages. Then Scheuring has already been writing a script and is just using McQueens work to finish it:
He said a first draft will be completed shortly, that process accelerated by what McQueen left behind.
What? I don’t want to see some writer bastardise McQueen’s unfinished work ripping out the good bits and throwing them in his own script. I want to see McQueen’s work lovingly moved forward by someone who is close to and understands his passion and his drive for cinema. What we’re going to see is it used to add a huge tagline to a script that’s almost complete, …adapted from Steve McQueen’s last, unfinished movie script… that sounds a hell of a lot better than anything they could have come up with before this find.
I think this is a travesty, and McQueen’s son has done a real sell out of the script here. He should have hired a writer who believed in the work to take it forward, not take bits to bolster his own script.
