- Neil Gaiman said that he sabotaged Jon Peters' adaptation of his comic series "The Sandman."
- He told Rolling Stone that he leaked the script to the entertainment site Ain't It Cool News.
Neil Gaiman deliberately sabotaged producer Jon Peters' movie adaptation of his comic-book series "The Sandman" by leaking its script in the hopes that it would be torn apart, the author told Rolling Stone.
Peters' adaptation was one attempt to adapt Gaiman's comic series, which originally ran from 1989 to 1996, for the screen. It wasn't done successfully until this year when Netflix released a series adaptation of the comic starring Tom Sturridge.
Gaiman told Rolling Stone that he took drastic measures to prevent Peters' film from being made after expressing his concerns to the producer's office.
"I sent the script to Ain't It Cool News, which back then was read by people," Gaiman told Rolling Stone, referencing the industry gossip site that peaked in popularity in the late '90s and early 2000s. "And I thought, I wonder what Ain't It Cool News will think of the script that they're going to receive anonymously. And they wrote a fabulous article about how it was the worst script they'd ever been sent. And suddenly the prospect of that film happening went away."
According to Gaiman, as well as Ain't It Cool News' 1998 review of the script, the script for Peters' adaptation warped the series' characters, turning its protagonist Dream, Lucifer, and the antagonistic demon The Corinthian into identical brothers — a plotline Gaiman said he thought "was really stupid."
It also, like the Peters-produced film "Wild Wild West," apparently included "giant mechanical spiders," Gaiman said.
"There was nothing in there I loved," Gaiman said he told Peters' office. "There was nothing in there I liked. It was the worst script that I've ever read by anybody. It's not just the worst Sandman script. That was the worst script I've ever been sent."