The Green Hell

I've been enjoying an interesting discussion over on Facebook about the Italian Cannibal cycle and it reminded me of an ambition I had in my younger years to write a screenplay about an Italian film crew making a cannibal film - the sketchy outline went something like this: a once great Giallo director down on his luck is hired by a fly-by-night Eurociné-style group to make a cannibal film. The film-within-film is made in a remote stretch jungle but the production is dogged by hellish terrain, bad weather and a difficult leading man refusing to slaughter animals on camera. When financing falls through midway, (film was to be set in the early 80’s as the genre was dying out) the film gets progressively weirder and more hallucinatory. The screenplay was a real mess of different influences – the Italian Cannibal cycle, Apocalypse Now, Aguirre Wrath of God (my diva director was to be along the lines of a tantrum throwing Klaus Kinski), and a bunch of moviemaking-is-hell films The State of Things, Living In Oblivion, Irma Vep, The Last Movie, and all of it overlaid with a Boogie Nights period sweep. It was nothing more than a pipe dream of course, I have no idea about the science of writing a screenplay, a minute per page etc. It was tentatively and terribly titled The Green Hell, lifted from a Misfits song...