Stage One: NottinghamThe script was originally sort of a procedural tale, told from the perspective of the Sheriff as he investigated Robin Hood’s actions and tried to figure out who was ‘terrorizing’ the area. Arguably not a bad take, certainly novel within the context of other movies that deal with the character. A little silly, perhaps, but likely to be easily salable to the audiences that make CSI and Law and Order monster pieces of programming.
Stage Two: ArcheryRidley Scott and Russell Crowe come on board, and Brian Helgeland is hired to rewrite. Frustrating given that the heat on the script is what caused the movie to move so quick in the first place, but let’s not confuse the heat of the actual pages with an enthusiasm for a concept that a studio knows it can sell like ice in the desert.
But here supposedly is where Scott, recently obsessed with archery, has the focus of the story shift to archers. That aspect is seen, to some extent in the final film, as Robin is part of an a division of archers that is returning from the Crusades with Richard the Lionhearted.
Interlude: Another Perspective on the Nottingham ScriptWhile the script had a lot of heat, neither Crowe or Scott now seem to have liked it. Recently both commented upon that draft to The Times Online. Crowe said, “it kind of read like CSI: Sherwood Forest to me…And I just wasn’t into doing that.” Ridley Scott is more aggressive, saying, “It was fucking ridiculous…It was terrible, a page-one rewrite.”
Stage Three: The TwistI’ll let Martell say it:
Then [Ridley Scott] came up with a brilliant idea! What if the Sheriff Of Nottingham and Robin Hood were the *same person*! Kind of like FIGHT CLUB. He’d be chasing himself for the whole damned movie! And there were some drafts of the screenplay written like that, until someone (maybe Helgeland) must have hinted that it might be a little silly.
Stage Four: Losing and Finding the PlotAnd, just as I’m about to publish this, Vulture drops a little more info. The site says Universal spent $6.7m on scripts alone. Furthermore, the ‘Robin and the Sheriff are one’ idea came from the notion that Robin would assume the identity of the Sheriff in order to return to England, after the Sheriff is slain in battle. That idea remains, in altered form, in the existing film.
But Scott didn’t like Helgeland’s draft, and Universal hired Paul Webb. Under him, the film became more serious. Scott didn’t like Webb’s draft, either. Helgeland came back, and changed the impersonation plot thread to what is seen on the screen now. In the meantime, Crowe had become impatient with Scott, as the film’s first release date was blown. Their relationship reportedly became quite strained.
Meanwhile, the film’s dialogue was problematic, being as it was the sewn-together amalgamation of several scripts. So Tom Stoppard was hired to smooth and polish even as the cameras rolled. Hard to tell how successful he was; while the dialogue isn’t terrible, it also contains almost nothing memorable.
And that’s the story of Nottingham –> Robin Hood as we have it now. Tangled, ugly and short-sighted, this is the ugly side of movie development. And, while this is an extreme version with far more participants, it probably happens a lot more often than you’d like to believe.