In a previous blog, I wrote about movies that were “in development” that often take forever to reach the screen, if they ever make it at all. For many years, the third big screen adaptation of I Am Legend was one such project. The film, starring Will Smith, which is currently burning up the box office, has been in the works since at least 1996, and many people today don’t know it’s already been made into a movie twice.
Legend, a short-story written by Richard Matheson, is about a bacteria that wipes out most of the planet, except for one lone man, who must battle against hideous creatures of the night that were created by the plague. The creatures are vampires, but they’ve clearly provided the blue-print for George Romero’s zombies. Reading Legend, you can imagine Romero’s brand of undead acting out the story in your mind.
Above: Richard Matheson
Matheson’s biography could also be called I Am Legend, especially among horror and sci-fi fans. He wrote many of the best Twilight Zone episodes, as well as The Incredible Shrinking Man, Duel, Somewhere In Time, and many other classic tales.
The inspiration for I Am Legend came when Matheson saw Dracula at the age of sixteen. “When I left the theater, I thought, Gee, one vampire is scary…what if the whole world was full of vampires?” He didn’t get around to writing the story until 1952, and it was published as a short story in 1954.
Matheson tries to put himself in the position of the main character of all his stories, and he placed I Am Legend in the tract-housing neighborhood he lived in at the time in Gardenia, California. A horror story is often much scarier when it could happen in any residential neighborhood, or to any ordinary person, and it’s a rule many successful horror stories have followed since.
Several years after Legend was published, Matheson was contacted by Hammer Films, the classy British horror studio. Matheson flew to England, and wrote his own script adaptation. Hammer had just done their versions of Frankenstein and Dracula, which starred Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Both were bloody films in their day, and when Hammer submitted the script for Legend to the British censors, they replied “Absolutely not!,” and the studio realized they wouldn’t be able to make the film in their native land.
Hammer then sold the script to a producer in Hollywood. Matheson wasn’t pleased with the finished film, The Last Man on Earth, which starred Vincent Price, but he was also told if he took his name off the film he wouldn’t get residuals. “I had four children, and I couldn’t afford that, so I invented a pen name: Logan Swanson.”
Yet if you go back and watch Last Man on Earth today, it’s a pretty spooky black and white film, and Price does a fine acting job. You also can’t help but notice strong similarities to Night of the Living Dead, which came four years later, and as Matheson jokes, “It was as close to the book as anyone will ever get except for Night of the Living Dead!”
In 1971 came the next big-screen adaptation, The Omega Man, which is now a camp classic starring Charlton Heston at his hammy best. Before The Omega Man, Matheson tried to get another adaptation of the story going with Hammer, who wanted the movie to stay close to the original story. Dan Curtis, the producer of the classic horror shows Dark Shadows and Kolchak The Night Stalker, was also interested in making a version of Legend that was faithful to the book.
The problem was the rights got mixed up when Hammer sold the script way back when. The rights for the script were owned by one business entity, the rights to the story by another. Once The Omega Man was up and running, Matheson wasn’t even told about it, but it didn’t matter. The finished film was so ridiculous, and so far removed from the story, “it didn’t even bother me because nobody would even recognize it.”
Then Legend was considered to be remade in 1996, this time as a vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger, with Ridley Scott directing. “The script wasn’t bad,” said Matheson, “It just wasn’t my book. But I’m sure Ridley would have done a great job, he’s a brilliant director.” This version of Legend was shut down because it would have been too costly to make.
Before the current version with Will Smith was finally ready to go, Matheson, who’s now eighty-one years old, joked, “In my lifetime I assume they’ll make it two or three more times.” He also wondered at the time whether Legend “would work as a film nowadays with everything that’s been done. It’s been done so many times, the book may be passé now.” Yet as the success of the latest version proves, the idea of being the last person alive on a lonely, dangerous planet still hits a nerve after all this time.
