David Hughes tells the story of the planned big budget reunion of Arnold Schwarzenegger and his Total Recall director, how it fell apart, and some exclusive news on a possible revival…
Ask any film fan to name the greatest movie never made, and chances are that someone will volunteer Crusade, the pre-Gladiator historical epic Arnold Schwarzenegger and director Paul Verhoeven planned to make following the worldwide success of Total Recall.
Schwarzenegger, then the world’s biggest box office star, would play Hagen, a thief-turned-slave who finds himself fighting alongside the Christian army to free Jerusalem from the Muslims in 1095 – only to discover that each of the rival faiths have more than religious reasons for waging holy war. The script had been written by Walon Green, who had collaborated with Sam Peckinpah on the bloodthirsty Western The Wild Bunch, and with Verhoeven on an early incarnation of Disney’s Dinosaur.
Green’s first draft of Crusade opens in France as Hagen, sentenced to hang for robbing an abbey, finds himself sharing a cell with Ari, a snake oil salesman who educates him in the value of religious artefacts. Learning that the Pope is always on the lookout for signs from God, Hagen burns a huge cross into his back, thereby tricking the holy fools into thinking it’s a stigmata-like symbol of his piety, and so engineering his emancipation.
Released from his bonds, and with Ari in tow, Hagen is dispatched to the Holy Land, where his first action is to rescue a Jewish wedding party from a merciless attack led by a Christian mob. “We wanted to be honest to history, and as close to what we think happened at that time, and were the motives of the time,” Verhoeven recalls, “and also to point out that the Crusades started out with persecuting the Jews. The moment they go on the road, they think, ‘these are the killers of God, the theocides, so let’s kill them first.’”
Bloodthirsty
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its heritage as the product of The Wild Bunch screenwriter and the director of Robocop and Starship Troopers, the script was not shy when it came to blood and guts.
In one scene, Hagen is bound, sewn into the rotting carcass of a donkey and set upon by hungry hyenas; in another, he narrowly escapes having his genitalia cleanly severed, the wound cauterised with a mixture of tar and fresh cow dung. One unlucky soldier is killed by having a trident thrown through his face, and when the chief antagonist, Emmich, is severed in two by Hagen’s sword, his legs and lower body remain on his fleeing horse while his upper body falls to the ground.
“It’s cruel and it’s violent; my kind of ultra-violence that I’ve displayed in many movies,” Verhoeven admits, “but there is also a lightness and tenderness and romanticism, and there are often funny scenes, and I think with Arnold it would have worked for an audience”.
“It would have a certain grandeur,” he adds, “also perhaps a little bit of hyper-reality, but on the other hand we wanted to have the historical events be completely correct, and the political point of view — the evil side of the Crusades, which is undoubtedly there. We wanted to make clear that this was not a great endeavour; that it was all cheating by the Pope, who basically lured all these fighting nobles from France so they could die somewhere else, instead of having trouble with them! That’s what most historians think about [Pope] Urban II.”
Before the Crusades, he notes, there was no persecution based on religion in Jerusalem: “Arabs, Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Jewry were all accepted. There was just this evil thought of the Church that because Jesus had lived there, or spent a couple of weeks there, and got killed, that this belonged to Christianity — an even more absurd claim than saying that God promised it to the Jewish population. But as Gore Vidal pointed out, ‘God is not a real estate dealer’.”
ED-209 kills the unfortunate Kevin Page in a scene from the film ‘RoboCop’, 1987. (Photo: Orion)
Writing
Total Recall screenwriter Gary Goldman, who was drafted in to rework the script, describes Green’s script as “a picaresque tale about a roguish serf who gets caught stealing, and the only way to get out of being hanged is to fake a miracle. He cynically endorses the Crusade and shows the venality of all the European lords who were jockeying for power.”
Playing to Verhoeven’s strengths, the story was subversive, allowing it to be viewed as a straightforward sword-and-sandals action film, and a satire about religious intolerance and ‘convert or die’ genocide. “We presented it in the way of Total Recall,” Verhoeven confirms, “so you can be looking at this movie completely in a non-involved way, just Arnold and adventure: he gets caged, he nearly gets castrated, he finds a girl — this beautiful Arab princess — and he has to kill the bad guys, and then he decides that the best part of life would be to be on his farm with his Arab wife. You could see it on that level. But there were also these other levels: the anti-Semitism [of the early Christians], the anti-Arab thinking, prejudices left and right. It was an indictment of the Crusades, but more generally, it was an anti-war statement, basically saying that the Christians had no business going there.”
Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone dancing in scene from the film ‘Basic Instinct’, 1992. (Photo: TriStar)
Carolco, the production company behind Total Recall, Basic Instinct and Terminator 2, gave Crusade the greenlight in early 1993, with Schwarzenegger being joined by Robert Duvall, John Turturro and Jennifer Connelly. Before shooting could begin, however, the company began to feel the aftershocks of its recent production profligacy, with expensive misfires such as Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin presaging a general downturn in the company’s fortunes.
Torn between the R-rated action epic or the PG-friendly swashbuckler Cutthroat Island, Carolco bosses Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna chose the lesser of two budgets – or so they thought. “I was stupid; I should have said that we could do it for a hundred million,” says Verhoeven, who holds a PhD in mathematics. “We started out with 75 or 80 or something, but we didn’t really get the budget lower than 95 or a hundred because it was too complex.”
When Cutthroat Island flopped in 1995, it drowned Carolco in a sea of red ink, bankrupting the company and leaving Schwarzenegger with the rights to Crusade in lieu of his fee.
ArrayDented
The decade that followed was not kind to Schwarzenegger or Verhoeven, however, with Last Action Hero, Eraser and End of Days diminishing the former’s star power, even as Showgirls and Starship Troopers dented Verhoeven’s.
“All of a sudden neither of them were that ‘hot’,” says Goldman, “and it just isn’t possible to make a movie of that size with people who aren’t hot, because it wasn’t an obviously commercial idea anyway.” At the time, the historical epic was a moribund genre, with 1995’s Braveheart seen as the exception that proved the rule. Nevertheless, in February 1999, Variety announced that Schwarzenegger was in “serious talks” to revive Crusade with producer Arnon Milchan. Verhoeven — then busy making Hollow Man — was set to shoot it sometime in 2001.
Director Paul Verhoeven on megaphone in between scenes from the film ‘Total Recall’, 1990. (Photo: TriStar)
However, the events of 9/11 happened, sending Hollywood scurrying for its collective bunker, opting for patriotic or jingoistic fare, and scuppering any possibility of making anything as politically complex as Crusade. Verhoeven saw it as a missed opportunity. “The story of the Crusades is the murderous attack of the Christians on the Arabs and the Jews,” he said at the time. “It’s absolutely the right subject for now.”
Perhaps the final nail in Crusade’s coffin came when it was announced that director Ridley Scott, whose Gladiator had single-handedly revived the historical epic, would make Kingdom Of Heaven, set against the backdrop of the Crusades. Its failure to repeat Gladiator’s success, coupled with Schwarzenegger’s new focus on his political aspirations, put Crusade on the back burner yet again. Besides, as Goldman points out, Schwarzenegger was already too old to play the lead as scripted. “Hagen is a rogue,” he says, “and you don’t have 50-year-old rogues; you have young rogues.”
Hope?
Verhoeven has never given up hope, however. “I think it’s a great script,” he says. “I don’t know if Arnold wants to do it, or if he still wants to do the same part. I’ve heard rumours that he might want to change the script a little bit, because of course he’s older than that now. He might have to adapt it a little bit so he doesn’t have to play a 30 year-old. But I think that it can be adapted, and I fully agree it’s one of the greatest scripts ever written.”
Little was heard of Crusade until the rights were acquired by “entertainment industry executive Sam Falconello and entertainment attorney Robert Zipser … to revive what is arguably one of the most famous unproduced projects in Hollywood history: the medieval epic Crusade.”
Schwarzenegger’s company, Oak Productions, had apparently sold all rights to Falconello’s company in 2018, and that although the new version would be based on the 24 January 1993 draft by Walon Green and Gary Goldman, “any director who comes onto the project will want a rewrite that comports with his or her vision.”
Zipser remains convinced that, despite the near-30 years that have passed since Green and Goldman’s first draft, Crusade can still be revived, perhaps by Netflix, Amazon or Apple. “It is surely the most famous movie that has never been produced. We believe that it could be a great movie long in the making.”
“It would have been an amazing film,” Vic Armstrong, the legendary stunt co-ordinator once set to work on the film, wrote in his memoir.
Arnie has been trussed up and stuck inside a dead donkey with his head sticking out of the arsehole
“It was going to be typical Verhoeven – loads of great sex and violence. There was one brilliant sequence where Arnie escorts this girl, who fancies him like mad because of his body, and they get captured by a band of vagabonds. Arnie is whacked over the head and the whole screen goes black. When he wakes up, we – the audience – see through his eyes a jackal snarling and snapping in his face. The camera pulls back and Arnie has been trussed up and stuck inside a dead donkey with his head sticking out of the arsehole. Surrounding the carcass is a pack of jackals. Eventually he bursts out, chases the jackals away and then hunts after the girl. Just great stuff”.
“It’s a shame we never made it”, he laments. Never say never…
