I'm Sure It's Old News

Sun, Sep 18, 2005

But I just learned via this NYT Magazine profile of David Cronenberg that

After “The Dead Zone,” Cronenberg spent most of 1984 writing 12 drafts of a screenplay for “Total Recall,” only to have the producer reject them all; he found himself going broke. Reitman - who says he has “always thought that David should make a comedy” - brought him out to Beverly Hills and pitched him “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” “I almost had him,” Reitman says. “Then like a week later Mel Brooks calls him up and offers him ‘The Fly.”’

This would only rival David Lynch being offered The Empire Strikes Back.