Retro Gaming Australia

Time is proving to be the vindicator of the existence of Super Mario Bros. The first ever big budget silver screen adaptation of a video game rubbed audiences the wrong way with its unique interpretation of the Super Mario Bros. universe, but other video game to movie adaptations make it seem marvelous (thanks Uwe Boll!).

Two people with great appreciation of the Super Mario Bros. film are Ryan Hoss and Steven Applebaum, who run the website Super Mario Bros. Movie Archive. Hoss started the site to “help its viewers understand what the filmmakers were trying to do with this movie, and at least appreciate the immense amount of thought and respect that went into creating it.” A nice change of pace from the standard Internet vitriol.

After running a story on the Super Mario Bros. Movie Archive’s recent script acquisitions, I was contacted by Steven Applebaum who had a little bit of a surprise in the works – an interview they had conducted with one of the writers on the Super Mario Bros. film – Parker Bennett. The full interview has just gone up over on their site, but we got to have a look at it first.

A contributor to National Lampoon and Playboy turned mobile developer, Parker Bennett spent the late 80s and early 90s in the motion picture business with writing partner Terry Runte (pictured together above, Terry sadly died about a year after Super Mario Bros. was released). Together, the two had written the film Mystery Date, a comedy starring a very young Ethan Hawke and produced by the late Orion Pictures company. Bennett and Runte were the third set of writers brought into the film, but the first to score credit on the final film. Ed Solomon, co-writer of the cult classic Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is the other writer credited in the film. You can read their draft script here.

At the point where Bennett and Runte join the picture, it’s 1992, the film has been in the works for 2 years, upward of $10 million has already been spent on the picture and the producers have nothing to show for it – and are understandably pissed. They’ve already been through one director (Greg Beeman) and numerous writers, including Oscar winner Barry Morrow. Morrow’s script was too heavy on the drama, so Jim Jennewein and Tom S. Parker were brought in to write a whole new lighter and more fantasy-oriented script (the “fantasy” script). When Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel joined the project, they threw out Jennewein and Parker’s script and sought to reinvent the visual look of the film with their own vision.

When they joined the project (read their initial pitch), Bennett and Runte had little to work with – the director’s vision for a parallel dinosaur world, and a general story direction that the film need to be about how the Mario Bros. became the Super Mario Bros. Bennett remembers “The whole idea of the parallel world and the dinosaurs evolving into people: that’s all Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel. They had this great take on the underlying concept of the movie. It was totally from them.” They spent about six weeks knuckling the story specifics out, with constant interference from the producers, who wanted to keep the budget from blowing out. “We were told, “Don’t even read these drafts, because we’re starting from scratch, coming up with a completely different take.” I think I skimmed [them] because I was curious, because Barry Morrow wrote Rain Man so, like “What did he do?” And I did [skim his draft], and it was pretty weirdly similar to Rain Man. So much so it had gotten nicknamed “Drain Man” in the production office.”

High cost scenes weren’t the only thing thrown out of the script though – much of the Mario Bros’ New York back story was cut too. “I think we kept a lot more of our story tied to the “real world,” trying to have a story with Mario and Luigi and the mobster-plumber guy. Scapelli.” The intent was to get to the parallel world sooner, and get the movie going. “I know that the editors really had their work cut out for them to bring it together. And I’m sure cutting out the first-act stuff that was set in our world made a lot of sense because it’s just too much story. You just lose track of that. You don’t care about that after you get into the dino-world. So, it makes total sense to get rid of that stuff.”

Bennett recalls working with the editors: “they [the editors] had a big challenge to make a movie out of what got shot, because, let’s be frank: it wasn’t a coherent script. Ever. (laughs).” Most of the final shooting script was knuckled out by Ed Solomon in a very short period. “It was totally Ed Solomon who did the shooting draft. Most of the dialogue and the final shape of the movie was from Ed, and I think Ryan Rowe worked with him for a while. And I know he had to do it in a ridiculously short amount of time. It was like he pulled a “three-day, stay-up-all-night” kind of thing. And he did it within probably ten days to get the shooting script done.”

The producers were concerned that the concept of the parallel worlds would be difficult for audiences to follow. “Terry and I wound up going back and we did this incredible amount of looping, because the story wasn’t quite tracking for people – the whole “parallel dimension thing” – the producers were worried that nobody was getting it. So we had a situation at the end where any shot that was a long shot or a character turned [their] back, we were putting new dialogue in there to try make the story make sense. The post-production supervisor said that it was the most ADR-looping she’d ever encountered on a film. So, it was a struggle to make the story come together even as much as it did.” (read more about the movie’s ADR process here)

Not everyone was happy with the changes to the script – Bennett had one particularly memorable clash with screen legend Dennis Hopper. “Dennis Hopper was hollering at me because I cut some lines of his. Like for half-an-hour he was hollering at me and made Terry and me look up the word “act” in the dictionary.” The conditions for the shoot were far from ideal, “They had chosen to shoot in this abandoned cement factory where The Crow had been shot, and it was just not an ideal situation. It was not air-conditioned. It was 105 degrees. The sound was really bad, so I think they wound up having to loop a lot of dialogue just because the quality of the sound; it was really echoey.”

Much of the inspiration in the Bennett and Runte script comes from Ghostbusters. “Rocky and Annabel did Max Headroom so they had that sort of post-apocalyptic sensibility and they were trying to do something much more hip. And Terry and I – our background is more as comedy writers, so we were thinking: ‘Okay: hip, a little dark… Parallel world… It’s Ghostbusters.'” The writers wanted to keep the audience thinking – to subvert their expectations. They came up with the angle of the fungus, the de-evolved King, taking over Dinohattan.

One of the major complaints from gaming fans is that the film is too far removed from what was in the games. Bennett and Runte were not familiar with the games, but a NES was brought in for the two to see what the series was all about. With no real story present in the games, they had to improvise, but still wanted to pay homage to the Super Mario Bros. origins. “I wanted to have the references to the game, but in a way that was peripheral, like this is the reality and the Super Mario Bros. game created this weird fantasy version of that reality. So, we did the stomper boots so they could jump from rooftop-to-rooftop and, you know, I think in one of the drafts they went off to play golf, because there was a Mario golf game at the time. (laughs). We weren’t even worried about the video game. We were worried about creating a story. The directors certainly weren’t worried about it. We thought “Well, let’s just – where we can – we’ll draw inferences from the game as best we can. The characters obviously – well, there are archetypes in the game [where] you go “Okay, Toad is kind of the “helper guy,” so we’ll create our Toad and let’s make him part of the rebellion. So, you just make those choices. And, in terms of the story, we just didn’t worry about it too much. It was just like: “We got this parallel dimension thing, we’re gonna make it work.”

Bennett feels that fans worry too much about nitty gritty details like whether or not Luigi has a moustache, instead of the film’s more glaring problems like low quality computer generated special effects and lack of establishing shots. “You never really understood where you were in that world. It was just a big set and you never really got the feeling you were in this place, really. I think the effects didn’t help and I think the fractured nature of the story was not pulling you in as well. There’s a lot of things that are wrong with the movie. The fact that Luigi doesn’t have a mustache is really not the big problem – (starts laughing) – with that movie.” He admits that it was mostly the directors that wanted to divorce the movie from the game. “I can tell you, Rocky and Annabel were not interested in worrying about anything in the game and how to turn that into anything in the movie. That was totally what we tried to add when we were making the story happen. And I think other writers, too. I think everybody who took on the script sort of had it in the back of their minds, “We can’t just ignore the fact that it’s based on this video game. We have to keep elements from the video game that make sense and the fans are gonna be expecting something that has a tie-in to the video game.” (pause) What I always wanted to do was have it be sort of a “wink-and-a-nod” to fans.”

The issues between the producers and directors began to escalate, which eventually led to Bennett and Runte being replaced. “So, the producers were looking at the time we were spending in the room spinning ideas and going “You know what, the script has to get written. We’ve got to get sets built. We’ve got to get a cast hired.” By us going off alone, I think that sort of sealed it in terms of us continuing on the project. We no longer had that sort of daily interaction with the directors and I think they had, in their heads, kind of moved forward in a different way around the story. So, we rewrote it, addressing that and other notes from the producers and from the directors, and pretty much the minute we turned in our revised draft, like the next day, Fred Caruso, the line producer who’s a really sweet guy, he came in and, in the nicest possible way, said, “Hypothetically, how soon could you guys get packed up and get out of this office?” (laughs)”

Once again, you can read the full interview over at the Super Mario Bros. Archive.