Oscar-winning screenwriter Neil Jordan certainly dodged a cannonball when he backed out of “Spider-Man: Iceberg Dead Ahead.”
Jordan, whose movies include “The Crying Game,” was the first writer attached to the musical, which last week announced it was postponing its opening for the sixth time.
He also introduced his friends Bono and The Edge to the dethroned Lion Queen, Julie Taymor.
“Yes, I must admit that I suggested they use Julie,” Jordan told me over the phone from his home in Ireland. “Sadly. Well, not sadly. Well — whatever.”
In a last-ditch effort to save his floundering musical, Bono fired Taymor last week, replacing her with Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who mostly writes comic books, and Phil McKinley, who directs the circus for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey.
(Will the new “Spider-Man” have some elephants and a clown car, I wonder?)
But Bono could have saved himself heaps of humiliation — and about $70 million — had he followed Jordan’s lead nine years ago and run as far away from Taymor as he could.
“I remember meeting Bono and Julie at Bono’s house in the South of France and discussing ideas for the book,” Jordan recalls. “But it rapidly became obvious to me that Julie’s ideas were not very sensible. She was not headed in, let us say, a coherent narrative direction.”
Jordan says Taymor was fixated on the now infamous Arachne character from the very first meeting.
The character comes from Ovid, but Taymor clearly modeled the spider woman on herself, turning her into an all-controlling artistic genius who manipulates the other characters and dominates, incoherently, the second act.
“These comic-book stories are really quite simple and should make for a fun musical,” Jordan says. “But she was talking on and on about Arachne, and I thought the whole thing was losing its focus.”
A source close to Jordan says that Taymor told him to let his imagination run wild because, she claimed, “I can stage anything.”
But when Jordan turned
in an early draft, Taymor balked.
“She said to Neil, ‘I can’t possibly stage this,’ and that ended their collaboration,” the source says.
Jordan doesn’t remember it that way.
“I wrote a kind of an outline, but I never began to write any scenes, thank God,” he says. “I quickly realized I did not want to continue with the show.”
But Bono cut Jordan in on the royalties.
“Do you think they’re worth anything?” he asks.
No prizes if you know the answer to that one.
MEANWHILE, over at the Foxwoods Theatre, Taymor’s pretentious and baffling script is being completely overhauled.
“They’re ripping chunks and chunks out of it,” says a source.
Whole scenes are being jettisoned, Arachne’s being downgraded to a flying special effect and more aerial sequences are being added.
McKinley’s going to turn the show into a shorter, special-effects-driven family spectacle more suited to the world of Steve Wynn than Steve Sondheim.
By the time “Spider-Man” reopens in June, we’re going to be calling it “Circus, Circus.”
On another front, Taymor, I’m told, is refusing to exit gracefully.
Her friends and advisers are urging her to accept a lucrative settlement and run away to Mexico, where she has a gorgeous villa that she built with money from “The Lion King.”
She’s got so much money, she could produce her version of “Spider-Man” at the local teatro amateur.
But she’s having none of it and is said to be hellbent on vengeance.
Arachne may be losing a lot of time onstage, but off stage, she’s still wreaking havoc.