Ernie, our star and son of a meat-processing mogul, falls in love with Ofelia. And Ernie’s uncle has killed his father to get the meat processing plant. But Ernie has been blamed for the murder and goes and hides in the sewers full of chunks of rotting meat. Eventually, he comes back to rescue Ofelia.
And I was going to have Ron Perlman play Ernie. So I tried to write it for him. And the idea was that Ernie was this baby who had been dropped and had his face broken on the concrete. They had to put him together the best they could, and he became sort of a mixture of the Phantom of the Opera and the Frankenstein monster. If I had Ron at age thirty-five, I would endeavor to find the money to actually make it.
MEPHISTO’S BRIDGE
The main character is this guy who thought he deserved everything but did nothing to get it, expecting that because he is a good guy, he should get the girl, the money, the car, the apartment. So this demon comes in and offers to help him get all that, and then he gets it and it’s unsatisfactory because he didn’t earn it. And the demon knows this, and he says, “You didn’t want the car; you wanted the respect. You didn’t want the girl; you wanted the love. You didn’t want the apartment; you wanted the reward for your efforts.”
Spanky, the demon, was this slender, almost beautiful creature that was kind of made of moving pieces when he was out of his host. It’s one of my favorite designs I’ve ever made. I wanted him to be very ornate. Right here [opposite], pre-anything, are the roots of the Faun, and the Hellboy creatures, and Hellboy himself. This is where it all comes from, this basic form.
When Spanky is in his host, a transformation occurs. For that design, we started archangels, which are represented with a mouth on each feather, or with an eye on each feather. And the idea was that each of the demon’s feathers would have an eye that represented a soul he had taken. So he was a walking epic. He was literally a lot of people together.
Mephisto’s Bridge is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written and has some of my favorite designs, too.
BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 161
* Spanky with wings (?) Based on Odilon Redon.
The wings against the light, blocking the sun with “Flare”
* Someone scratches or breaks the glass in a window that they’re going to open when they remember that it’s the 9th floor!!!
* Reinforce or change the Billboard Fight A III
* Wings with layered colors or uniformly steel black, “blued” like a gun.
* Rusty pendulum clocks hanging from a sheet on the roof
Step over a cross at the b.o/ritual.
Could be of Shadow/Light.
BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 173
* Lottie goes to St. Lazarus, a feather falls out, the beating of enormous wings is heard.
* White, milky eyes zombified… “Harryhausenly” Everyone looks at the same place.
* The apparition of Joey with computer “ripple” like intensely colored little flames and like the halo of a fire virgin.
* Joey with CGI crash marks.
* Mollusk. “Spanish Shawl” (NUDIBRANCH)
BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 113
* Voice-activated light dimmer in his APT
* “I’ll race you little Faust…”
* Spanky has tentacle-like “legs” that “open up” into two parts.
* IF/STOP but for a MONITOR with a magazine dummy.
* Sometimes we trick people this way or the other but sometimes… truth is the tool to use, as simple as that”
* You’re a couple of years 2 late.
* Whole new ball game pal.
* Y’re like me, You are… X.
* Spanky: “Jus’ Call me a therapist”
* “Martyn, I haven’t been all bad 2 U have I?”
The texture of Spanky’s skin is “in motion.”
SQUISH!!
THE LIST OF SEVEN
BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 109
* Fear: the wretched thing… it’ll die soon…
* One of the A.R.C. from “List”
* No one else’s Fingerprints at the crime scene.
* The cops in the hospital/family life or “Gimme a break pal I have X’
* The guy is thrown from the tenth story, he crashes, they scream at him “It was a mistake, go hack upstairs, but please… use the service stairs”
* Credit card SPANKY ZZIP-PFFT SPUT!!
* “You are not just an observer MARTYN”
* Bolas ZZUCK! tumble, fire (Burning Man)
* They hired a TOY MAKER for A.R.C.
* We open the tape with the Doyle-like professor on which he speaks to us of his vision and shows us a model of a human eye. They have jute beneath the porcelain.
* Take note, Sparks: “IS this Masonic? “Cause I’m a Catholic.”
* Sparks tries not to speak about his brother…
* Martyn calls or observes Lottie on CHRISTMAS DAY or he sees her with a ♥
* Hanging from the Billboard S.
The story is about Arthur Conan Doyle before he writes his first Sherlock Holmes story. He gets tangled up with an occult society in Victorian London that is planning to assassinate Queen Victoria and substitute an automaton for Prince Eddy. The society is building sort of a doomsday machine in a castle in the north of the United Kingdom. And I wanted to create these Caspar David Friedrich-type ruins and Piranesian spaces.
Mark is a very good writer of characters, so Conan Doyle was a really great personality in the screenplay. I love Conan Doyle and know his biography well, so I wanted to include details like the fact that he was an ophthalmologist. And the idea was that he succeeds in the movie only when he includes Holmes as a character, which is based on a secret agent for Queen Victoria named Jack Sparks, who is like a James Bond in Victorian times with all the accoutrements and the gadgets.
Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes had a lot of the energy, which is similar to what I wanted to do with the Holmes character in The List of Seven. What I kept saying to Universal was that we didn’t need to shoot Holmes boringly. We needed to shoot him to suit the adventure. We are so used to having a passive intellectual—a guy who lives a monastic life. But for me, Holmes is a guy who is pensive and immobile for long periods—like, literally, he could stay in the same pose on a sofa for days, not even eating—but then, when he says, “Come with me, old chap,” he comes alive and it is an adventure.