Lost Soul: the Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's "The Island of Dr. Moreau"

 David Gregory's arresting 2014 documentary, Lost Soul:  the Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's "The Island of Dr. Moreau" has the fascination of a freak show.  The picture, no doubt incomplete and biased in favor of the quixotic Stanley, chronicles the production of a big-budget Hollywood horror movie, The Island of Dr. Moreau, an ambitious film maudit featuring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer.  The film's thesis is that Richard Stanley, a genuinely creative if eccentric auteur, conceived a project too ambitious to be inexpensively produced as an  independent film.  As the picture's budget increased, studio executives become concerned about their investment and wrested control of the film from its creator.  The picture was completed, albeit in a seriously compromised form, and derided as a failure when released in 1996,  Stanley, for his part, was effectively blackballed as impractical, inefficient, an artist as opposed to the sort of skilled craftsmen that Hollywood values, and spent the next 20 years in exile and solitude.  Late in the film, an actress named Fairuza Balk, one of the picture's performers, says that the story illustrates the power of money in Hollywood and that the film's executives were so greedy "they would sell their own mothers for cash."  But she misunderstands what we are shown in the documentary.  The vice that destroys Stanley and his project is not greed, but pride.  Stanley has no control over the production after the first week of shooting, but the movie collapses anyhow -- in large part, this is because of the outrageous (if amusing) behavior of Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando on the set, and, also, attributable to the derisory arrogance of John Frankenheimer, the Hollywood stalwart recruited to salvage the production.  It is pride that goeth before the fall, a precept illustrated in Fassbinder's similar picture Beware the Holy Whore, a fictionalization of the calamities that befell one of the German's productions -- calamities all having their origin in the brutish arrogance of the people involved in making the movie.  

Richard Stanley is a South African who had lived for 20 years in London before conceiving the project of yet another film version of H.G. Wells' cautionary, anti-vivisectionist science fiction novel The Island of Dr. Moreau.  Stanley is the best thing in Gregory's film, prepared, it seems, as an adjunct to the director's return to big budget cinema with his production of The Color out of Space, an adaptation of a Lovecraft novella that starred Nicholas Cage.  With luminous pale skin and classically aquiline and handsome features, Stanley is prettier than any of his actors and, at least on-screen, highly charismatic.  He's like Lord Byron in Hollywood, exceptionally glib and eloquent -- Stanley speaks in perfect prose delivered at a dizzyingly fast clip.  As befits a specialist in horror films, he seems to believe in the occult and claims to have engaged a sorcerer to influence the outcome of The Island of Dr. Moreau.  We see him tramping about the mountains at Montsegur in France where he lives, noting that this was where the Cathars, whom he regards as fellow maligned eccentrics, made their last stand against the forces of orthodoxy.  We see him wearing a cape and wreathed in romantic mist in the mountains.  Stanley had been obsessed with Wells' novel since early childhood.  He tells us that H.G. Wells believed that Joseph Conrad imitated the structure of the novel and the character of Dr. Moreau in conceiving his novella "The Heart of Darkness."  The two writers had been friends but Wells' assertion of plagiarism destroyed their relationship.  Conrad, for his part, said that the inspiration for his "Mistah Kurtz" was the British explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, who happens to be Richard Stanley's great-great grandfather.  The director had prepared some story boards and written a treatment of the novel that was supposedly close to the book but much more lurid -- for instance, Moreau is sleeping with his beast-(wo)men.  (Stanley also confesses that he felt cheated when an earlier film advertised a scene in which a woman changes into a  panther -- the earlier movie with Burt Lancaster didn't deliver, but Stanley intended to shoot that scene in his version.)  Stanley had made two highly regarded indie horror films, low budget pictures but effectively directed and, so, he pitched his project to New Line Cinema's money men.  They were intrigued, impressed by Stanley's fervor and intelligence, but skeptical as to whether he could manage a large budget picture.  Originally, the production was conceived as involving a budget of 6 to 8 million dollars.  Here greed intervenes -- someone had the idea of casting the film with expensive movie stars:  initially James Wood and Bruce Willis were to perform with Brando.  The film's producers decided that the project was too ambitious for the relatively inexperienced Stanley and so they recruited Roman Polanski to direct.  Stanley retained a warlock in London to convene his coven and cast spells when he went to plead his case with Brando.  To everyone's amazement, Brando liked Stanley, possibly due to the influence of black magic, but more likely because he was intrigued that the South African was related to Henry Stanley who had been the model for Kurtz in the Conrad book and its subsequent adaptation in Apocalypse Now (featuring Brando of course).  In any event, Brando demanded that Stanley direct the picture and since the star's  involvement was thought to be vital for the film's success, the inexperienced South African was retained on the production.  There were bad signs, however, at the outset:  one of the studio execs was bizarrely astounded that Stanley took four sugars with his coffee, a violation of industry norms that seems to have alarmed the man; the budget was written with a one and a half million contingency for replacing the director if this was required.  (The Hollywood executives who appear in the film are unwilling to articulate what they found disturbing about Stanley, possibly due to a fear of appearing philistine in the documentary, but the implication is that they found him "visionary" and, therefore, too creative to work successfully on a big-budget production.  Stanley's pride doomed him.  Objectively, he was too inexperienced to control a film that was now budgeted for 50 or 60 million dollars and out of his depth.  Self-destructively, Stanley selected a rain forest location in Queensland, Australia, one of the wettest places on earth and built an elaborate set an hour from the nearest amenities.  Stanley wanted to key his images on a mountain looming overhead, but the peak was rarely visible in the fog and rain. and his set was too close to the peak in any event to provide a good view of it.  Stanley rented a spectacular house, a sort of treehouse, and refused to leave it, apparently paralyzed by anxiety over the production that was slipping out of control.  Bruce Willis ended up in a divorce from Demi Moore and withdrew from the project,  Val Kilmer, then at the peak of his fame, was hired to replace him.  Kilmer came to the set and taunted Stanley.  After a week of shooting, Stanley was fired, paid his full director's fee on the condition that he not approach closer than 40 kilometers to the film set.  He withdrew into the forest to plot revenge and smoke marijuana.

The really astonishing stuff occurred after Stanley was fired, falsifying the picture's implicit contention that Stanley was too creative and visionary to successfully direct the movie.  In fact, the behavior of Kilmer and Brando was monstrous from the outset and became increasingly monstrous as the production appeared.  Brando, of course, was horribly miscast.  The original mumblecore method actor was ill-suited for an essentially declamatory role in a horror film.  (After Last Tango in Paris in which Brando was allowed to play himself, he was miscast in just about every other film made at the end of his career -- he's miscast in Apocalypse Now, for instance, a huge fat man with a lisp supposed to imitate a ruthless Special Forces commando.)  Brando appeared on set with his face painted Kabuki white, wearing a white tunic of some sort described as a "diaper".  He demanded bizarre hats and wore a  bucket over his bald head that he had filled with ice.  (Brando liked business with ice as witness the famous scene in Missouri Breaks, played by the actor in drag, in which he soothes a painful tooth with a cube of ice extracted from a tub where the corpse of someone he has just assassinated is cooling.)  The film's cast included the world's smallest man, a 17 inch tall midget from the Dominican Republic.  Brando rewrote the script to eliminate a very skilled German actor who had been hired to play his assistant.  Brando substituted the midget for the German and dressed him up exactly as he was dressed, creating a "mini-me" effect.  The midget was an inveterate sexual harasser and, apparently, an excellent dancer -- there's footage of him dancing in a club with people making a wide circle around the actor to keep from "treading upon him."  In the documentary's climax, Stanley comes  out of the jungle and answers a casting call for extras for the film he conceived, ending up cast as a bull-dog man, unrecognizable in a latex mask he wore for the part.  He infiltrated the set and had access to explosives, but didn't blow anything up.  Stanley remarks wryly that he began the film as its creator-god and ended playing one of Moreau's monstrous beast-men.  Stanley remains too arrogant to attribute the catastrophes that beset the picture to his own delusional pride.  He claims that the film project collapsed when the warlock in London developed a brittle bone syndrome that reversed all of his spells -- this led to hurricanes, people getting bit by spiders so venomous that their "flesh melted", and a host of other misfortunes.  Brando's daughter, Cheyenne, had committed suicide and the star was only willing to appear for a week at the location in Australia -- on the day of his first scenes, he simply didn't come out of his trailer.  Later, Val Kilmer wouldn't leave his trailer until Brando had come out; Brando likewise said he wouldn't emerge until Kilmer was on the set.  The stand-off lasted for several days.  Of course, no one could restrain Brando and Kilmer's arrogance because they were simply paid so much money that they didn't care about the project in the slightest,  By this point in his career, Brando had complete contempt for acting and told Fairuza Balk that she didn't need to do any thing at all to earn her wages since the script was garbage anyhow -- just take the money, he said.  Both Kilmer and Brando were not merely content to take the money and run; rather, they took the money and, then, tried to tank the production.  

Gregory's documentary is 99 minutes long and one senses that there would be enough material here for a whole mini-series.  Every minute of the movie is compelling.  There's a melancholy coda:  after making the critically acclaimed Color out of Space in 2016, Stanley's ex-girlfriends accused him of beating them up and had court records to prove their claims.  Stanley's magic again had gone awry.  He's now blackballed in Hollywood on account of domestic abuse.  The studio that profited from The Color out of Space paid the proceeds to a foundation for battered women and vowed to never work with Stanley again.