JPM Bonus – Jurassic Park 4 Script

Jurassic Park Minute

The hosts analyze the leaked first draft of the unproduced Jurassic Park 4 screenplay by John Sayles. They trace the development of the fran

Key takeaways

• The Sayles draft features Pteranodons escaping to the mainland and attacking a Little League game.
• A central MacGuffin involves retrieving dinosaur DNA from a Barbosol can lost on Isla Nublar.

Main topics

• John Sayles Jurassic Park 4 script analysis
• Evolution of the Jurassic Park franchise

Notable quotes

My lips are sealed.

Conclusion

While the script draft is structurally messy and uninspired in its sec

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:14) Welcome back, Patreon supporters, to the Pele Media bonus episode for this week. We're going to be covering the John Sayles first draft of Jurassic Park 4. I'm Kyle. I'm Brady. And like I said, yeah, we're going to be going over this draft today for Jurassic Park 4, which was never produced and what eventually would become Jurassic World. So Brady, let me ask you about this. When you walked out of the theater after seeing Jurassic Park 3, was the first thing in your mind, you know what, I need to go back to that island. I need some more Jurassic Park in my life. Speaker 1 (0:45) Isla Sorna? No. Isla Nublar was kind of always where my interests were. But I think you mean to go back to that franchise, if you will. Sure, yeah. To be honest with you, I remember my initial thoughts upon leaving that theater were, I miss Stan Winston, excuse me, I miss the T-Rex, and I miss Michael Crichton. And Michael Crichton, you know, the T-Rex is obviously kind of an anecdote because it wasn't even barely in Jurassic Park 3, but Michael Crichton's... Speaker 1 (1:16) His ideas. The fact that what he had to say was important and meant something. And whereas we're both open about our... We have some fondness for Jurassic Park 3. We think it's a fine film for what it wants to be. It's still not a film that is heavy with ideas and themes and philosophical issues, which I think make a Jurassic Park film a Jurassic Park film. It's not just dinosaurs. This John Sills... Draft has the dinosaurs, but it lacks everything that you, it lacks that connective tissue that the Jurassic Park films and the franchise need. And it's not in here and it was barely in Jurassic Park three. And so, no, yeah, yeah. I had kind of said, if this is where this, these filmmakers and where this franchise are going to be going with this is away from heavy material, not heavy material, but smart material into just action thrillers. I'm really not interested. I kind of think well enough should be left alone. And, um, and that's it, man. I think that helicopter should have taken grant Ellie, the kids, Malcolm and Hammond off into the sunset and probably never, never gone back. Yeah. So, you Speaker 2 (2:23) know, it's funny because I think Scott was even the guy who brought this up where he feels that, uh, the lost world was kind of a retelling of. of King Kong that Steven Spielberg was trying to do that. Jurassic Park is kind of a retelling of Frankenstein. And as we'll get into it a little bit further, I think that what they were going for with this Jurassic Park 4 idea was getting into a little bit of the island of Dr. Moreau. So there's definitely some thematic, some inklings of thematic ideas with that. But this script, I think we have to talk about this too. And this script we're going to be talking about is actually the first draft. of the John Sayles script. And apparently this was not the final draft, which they were almost about to shoot, which we've heard goes to even some crazier places. But let's back up before we actually talk about the script and talk a little bit about what it was going into Jurassic Park 4, what the catalyst was to get Jurassic Park 4 made. Apparently, during the production of, and I want to say this real quick, I'm taking most of the notes that I've found here today from an article from denofgeek.com. It was an article written by Rob Lane last year. And if you want to find more information, in-depth conversation about Jurassic Park 4 and what it could have been, definitely check out denofgeek.com. You can just Google this. It was written by Rob Lane. I think if you just Google Jurassic Park 4, it's one of the first three results on Google. And I highly recommend reading Rob's article because there's some really fascinating stuff in there about Jurassic Park 3, about film production. And, you know, he's a really good writer. He's written several different articles. And if you want to look at the show notes today, I will link off to that article in the show notes. But to get back to it, during the production of Jurassic Park 3, as usually happens, Steven Spielberg and Joe Johnson actually started tossing around ideas for Jurassic Park 4 on the set. And I think Joe Johnson said something to the effect of, boy, I can't wait to make that movie. sarcastically and was actually taken that Jurassic Park 4 was about to pick up production as soon as Jurassic Park 3 ended. So Jurassic Park 3 did not bomb at the box office. It did pretty well. Of course, it was kind of a sliding scale from Jurassic Park to The Lost World to Jurassic Park 3, but the film was profitable at the end of the day. And of course, in Hollywood, if it's profitable and if people recognize the property, they're going to want to try to exploit that as much as they can. So Jurassic Park 4 in some form was an inevitability. So Johnson wanted to step away from the franchise for a little bit, but he did say that Steven Spielberg's idea for Jurassic Park 4 would take the series to a whole new level. The entire mythology of Jurassic Park would be going to entirely new places. So one of the early ideas that they had tossed around was that the Pteranodons at the end of Jurassic Park 3 would actually get off of the island. So that was a constant part of the idea for Jurassic Park 4, which it's kind of funny because when we talk about what Jurassic Park 4... was originally going to be, Brady, I think we're going to see a lot of elements that were shared in both the Jurassic Park cartoon that did not get made, and then also some elements that were brought over into the Jurassic Park video game, the Telltale video game that we talked about earlier on the show. Speaker 1 (5:14) That's right. Speaker 2 (5:14) The primary MacGuffin of that whole idea for Jurassic Park 4 coming back in that. In a 2002 interview with Starlog magazine, Steven Spielberg was quoted as saying, and I quote, Speaker 2 (5:38) And I'm not going to tell you anything about it. My lips are sealed. So that was kind of the only idea that we had going into it, that Steven Spielberg was very excited about it, that Joe Johnston was also excited about the movie. And whatever this idea was that was cooking, it sounded like it was going to be something pretty great if those two guys can get behind it. But in 2002, Steven Spielberg actually hired Kathleen Kennedy on as producer and William Monaghan, who wrote The Departed, to write Jurassic Park 4. And both Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum were told about the script concept and expressed interest in coming back. I believe that Sam Neill wasn't signed to the movie, but it was kind of an inevitability at some point that he was going to be a part of Jurassic Park 4. No one is really sure what the Monaghan draft was about, but Kathleen Kennedy did state that they were not going to go back to the jungle, that this movie was going to take place. off of the island or outside of a jungle setting. So there was a lot of speculation it was going to be about dinosaurs arriving in Costa Rica and then breeding out of control. And we can see a little bit of some of those ideas kind of reaching over into this John Sayles script. But Keira Knightley and Richard Attenborough had actually both been contacted about appearing in the Monaghan version with Keira Knightley actually auditioning for the film. And I think it was kind of a given that Richard Attenborough was going to be in the film. But William Monaghan left the project to go work on Kingdom of Heaven and John Sayles. was brought in. Now, John Sayles has written a movie called Lone Star. Have you ever seen Lone Star, Brady? Speaker 1 (6:58) No, no, I haven't. Speaker 2 (6:59) Lone Star is one of my favorite screenplays. It's a really complex and complicated movie about a town on the Mexico-Texas border and race relations in that town and crime. It's the story about, I believe it's Chris Cooper, plays the sheriff of the town, and his father in a lot of flashbacks is played by Matthew McConaughey. Matthew McConaughey was a sheriff who, maybe he wasn't racist in the town, but he had to kind of back up some of the racial tensions in the town and keep people from killing each other. You know, Caucasians in the town and then Mexicans who had crimes. the border to live in the town. And the script gets very, very complicated from there and actually ends in a really fascinating place at the end of the whole thing. But it's definitely, if you haven't seen Lone Star and you can get a hold of it, I definitely recommend watching it. It's a fantastic script. I love it. So very accomplished screenwriter who had actually worked with Steven Spielberg before on a project called Night Skies. Have you ever heard of Night Skies? Speaker 1 (7:51) Was Night Skies turned into a TV miniseries? Speaker 2 (7:54) No, it wasn't directly, but it was turned into a couple of other things. Maybe a little movie you probably heard of before called E.T. Let me tell you about the concept of this movie, and you tell me if... If this sounds familiar. It's a family that in the 1970s lives on a farm that starts seeing strange lights in the sky. And then some strange things start happening around their house. And then it turns out that some extraterrestrials are living in the barn outside of their house and are terrorizing the family at night. So this movie sounds a lot like... E.T., it sounds like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yeah. It kind of sounds like Poltergeist, and it also kind of sounds like Signs. So this movie actually, Night Skies, it kind of became all of those, but more directly became E.T. In fact, if you go and look at some of the... You can actually Google Night Skies, and it'll bring up some props that were made and some animatronics or earlier renderings of the aliens that look like kind of a proto-ET. It's much more scary. It was a horror movie, and the family had to fight the aliens and escape and get away from them. But it's one of those that I really wish was realized because the screenplay, it sounds more like signs like anything else, but it sounds like a pretty fascinating screenplay. But have you ever heard of ET2? Speaker 1 (9:08) No. Okay, Speaker 2 (9:08) so E.T. 2, I think there's actually a script out there you can read for it, but there was actually a sequel in pre-production for E.T. at one point because when Steven Spielberg had made the movie E.T., it was a part of the option that he would have to be the guy who made E.T. 2 if it ever got made. But he made E.T. and said, there's no sequel that you can make to this that would top. ET, the extraterrestrial. It's just, it's sacred ground that we should never come back for a sequel. But Universal flexed their muscles and were like, no, this movie made is the highest grossing film of all time right now. We want you to make a sequel to ET. So he said, okay, fine. I'm the guy that has to write the script, so I'll go ahead and write it. And the script is a lurid horror movie about alien bounty hunters coming down and trying to track down E.T. It completely throws off all of the kind of like peaceful, spiritual side of the E.T. story in place for this just disgusting horror movie about these aliens coming back and like trying to kill E.T. and trying to kill Elliot and his family and stuff like that. So it's basically like a poison pill option that Steven Spielberg inserted into his contract so that he couldn't get, you know, pushed around by Universal to make a film that he didn't want to make. But backing up to Jurassic Park for a minute, John Sayles was brought in to rework the, I guess, the ideas of the William Monaghan script. And Alex Proyas, who directed Dark City, was brought in to direct the movie. But at some point, he backed out on the project and went on to make iRobot instead and was actually quoted as saying he's completely uninterested in working on the script that they had at the time. So that's kind of the first. inkling of the idea that maybe the script was not as great as it was initially, you know, kind of like built up by Kathleen Kennedy and Steven Spielberg and everybody that had seen the version of it. So I don't know if he was looking at the script that we're going to be talking about today or not, but I would have to maybe agree with him on that. But the version of the script we're going to be talking about today is one that was actually leaked. It was intercepted when Steven Spielberg's email account got hacked and somebody was able to find the PDF of the script, the John Sayles script. And, uh, and print it out and then make a copy of it. And then it got out there and John Sayles did confirm that this was the first draft of the script. And I believe he is the only writer credited on it. So we don't know if anybody else was brought in to rework the script or maybe there was like how many other drafts there were to it. But one of the things that doesn't show up in this script is the idea of human-raptor hybrids, which is something that when Jurassic Park, when the script leaked, somehow a lot of these images leaked as well. So a lot of people were speculating that there was going to be velociraptor people. in the movie. And I want to say at one point, who Speaker 1 (11:38) is the paleontologist that worked very closely with Jurassic Park and the Lost World? Jack Horner. Yes, Jack Speaker 2 (11:44) Horner actually talked about being contracted for it too and said that if you liked velociraptors then you were in store for a lot of more velociraptors than Jurassic Park 4. But there was an image that leaked that I think ran on Ain't It Cool News and it was like a human screaming but it was like half velociraptor. Do you remember when that came public? Speaker 1 (12:02) Yeah, you Speaker 2 (12:02) can Speaker 1 (12:02) still... You can still find that around the internet. And Speaker 2 (12:05) there was also another image of a half-human, half-raptor-looking dude, and one of his arms has been chopped off and replaced by a laser gun or something like that. Have you seen that image? Speaker 1 (12:17) Yep, it's kind of reminiscent