Everyone loves a what if, us especially. We all like to dream about the greatest projects never made, right? Well, here’s one more to add to that pile. In a recent episode of TCM and MAX’s new Talking Pictures podcast with host Ben Mankiewicz, Steven Soderbergh reveals a very old project that didn’t come to pass that we’ve either long forgotten or never heard about (vague recollection).
The era was right after Soderbergh’s directorial debut, “Sex Lies And Videotape,” which shot his career into the stratosphere. Soderbergh, at 26, had become the youngest American filmmaker ever to win the Cannes Palme d’Or prize (he quipped, “It’s all downhill from here”), and the world was his oyster. Hollywood was clamoring, stars were knocking, and Talking Pictures playfully chided the filmmaker for not going with the star-driven Hollywood route.
The hindsight context there is instead of doing that, Soderbergh would go on to make a string of commercial and critical flops (1991’s “Kafka,” 1993’s “King of the Hill,” 1995’s “The Underneath”), which, of course, seemed like the very wrong choice in retrospect and a choice, he said almost landed him permanently in “director’s jail.” That story is well known; he salvaged it all by doing the invigorating experimental exercise of “Schizopolis” and then recovered his commercial career with the success of 1998’s “Out of Sight” with George Clooney.
But as Talking Picture was ribbing him, Soderbergh reminded that, well, actually, he did have a big Hollywood project set up, “The Last Ship,” with Harrison Ford as the lead and producer Sydney Pollack backing him, and it was all ready to go. In fact, it could have been his “Sex, Lies & Videotape” follow-up if historical fate hadn’t intervened.
“Well, the fact of the matter is, one of the projects I set up with Sydney Pollack as producer was based on the novel by William Brinkley and was called ‘The Last Ship,’” he explained on the podcast. “And I was adapting it, I did adapt it, and wanted to go to Harrison Ford to play the lead, and the Berlin Wall fell, and all that stuff happened, and it became clear, the subject matter, as portrayed in the book, suddenly, thankfully, kind of became irrelevant.”
“And so the project went away,” he continued. “And it was later resuscitated as a TV series, but that was — when you talk about wanting to send a message after ‘Sex, Lies’ to people [that said]: I am not going to just make that movie over and over again—the three things that I put into development after [‘Sex Lies’] were, ‘The Last Ship,’ ‘Kafka’ and ‘King Of The Hill.’ And so, ‘The Last Ship,’ I have a script, we were ready, Sydney obviously had a relationship with Harrison, and we were ready to start making that happen, and then the world changed, and it went away.”
In case it’s not clear, “The Last Ship,” heralded as a great “men at war” novel, was basically a kind of a post-Cold War thriller slash a post-apocalyptic what-if telling the story of a United States Navy guided-missile destroyer, the fictional USS Nathan James (DDG-80), on patrol in the Barents Sea during a brief, full-scale nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. It details the ship’s ensuing search for a new home for her crew.
Here’s the book’s synopsis:
The unimaginable has happened. The world has been plunged into an all-out nuclear war. Sailing near the Arctic Circle, the U.S.S. Nathan James is relatively unscathed, but the future is grim, and Captain Thomas is facing mutiny from the tattered remnants of his crew. With civilization in ruins, he urges those that remain—one-hundred-and-fifty-two men and twenty-six women—to pull together in search of land. Once they reach safety, however, the men and women on board realize that they are Earth’s last remaining survivors—and they’ve all been exposed to radiation. When none of the women seems able to conceive, fear sets in. Will this be the end of humankind?
The series version came out in 2014 on TNT, ran for five seasons (!), and starred Eric Dane, Rhona Mitra, and Adam Baldwin. Soderbergh just premiered his latest film, “Presence,” at Sundance (read our review), and his next film is likely the spy thriller, “Black Bag,” with Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender.
You can listen to the entire podcast below and check out the original series trailer too.
