LWIA 4.3: The Movie

I watched this while making grape jam yesterday, which was very funny.

A short time later, in February of 1994, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell took a meeting that would be crucial for the successful completion of From Hell. By this point Campbell had already drawn Chapter Eight, which would come out that June, and was at work on Chapter Nine, which would see print at year’s end. Nevertheless, there was the plain problem of how to make money off of the comic. Much of it had been produced under Taboo’s $100 a page format, which meant that Campbell and Moore had each made less than $9000 for the first 174 pages of the comic. The standalone issues and move to Kitchen Sink, but they were hardly top sellers, selling only ten thousand copies an issue or so, with only two or three issues a year. Moore had largely solved the problem for himself via his Image work, but Campbell had no similar options. And so they turned to the most obvious potential source of income: Hollywood.

And so the pair took a meeting with producer Don Murphy, who was then in post-production on his and his partner Jane Hamsher’s debut film, the soon to be infamous Natural Born Killers. Moore was, at least according to Hamsher, who recalls Murphy giving her stacks of his comics while they were in film school together, “one of Don’s big heroes,”[1] although this relationship would eventually sour to the point where Murphy described Moore, not entirely inaccurately, as “an old man who smokes too much hash and prays to a lizard god.”[2] This took place in one of the surprisingly large number of blog comment sections in which Don Murphy can be found angrily defending his honor against anyone who might speak ill of his work—indeed, Murphy once optioned a book, James Robert Smith’s The Flock, after getting into it with Smith in the comments of Eddie Campbell’s blog. For his part, Moore has never mentioned Murphy once save for a passing description of him as “a nice bloke who phones me up and asks if I’ve got any more projects that could be turned into films, any laundry lists that I might have forgotten about.”[3]

This cavalierness is generally in keeping with Moore’s attitude towards adaptations of his work, at least prior to him souring on the idea completely in the wake of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie, also produced by Murphy. For all that he’s withering about them in interviews, Moore professes to “have never watched any of the adaptations of my books. I’ve never wanted to, and there’s absolutely no chance of me doing so in the future.”[4] (Asked to resolve the contradiction between that attitude and his criticisms, Moore joked “I do prefer to criticise things from a position of ignorance.”[5]) To him the major virtue of film adaptations was that “you got a lot of option money, and then after a couple of years they decided that they weren’t going to make the film, which was a perfect result.”[6] In this regard, the film adaptations of his work ought be thought of as an extension of his larger “artist as con man” ethos—indeed, when an interviewer put to him that his desire to get paid for movies that never got made amounted to trying to get money for old rope, Moore positively beams with agreement. And even when the movies did come out, Moore was largely indifferent to them, as evidenced by his not even bothering to watch them. As he put it, he maintained “a sense of emotional distance” from the films, citing the anecdote of Raymond Chandler being asked what he thought of Hollywood ruining his books and pointing to his shelf to note that the books are actually just fine up there.

This attitude undoubtedly served Moore well when it came to the From Hell movie, which finally came out in 2001. Obviously From Hell was never going to be an easy adaptation, but the scale of misguidedness involved in the film is still striking. Campbell recalls the producers coming to him saying that they had a great idea—“you don’t know who the Ripper is until right at the end!”, noting, obviously, that this “was the first thing we kicked out, because Alan absolutely detested the idea of turning murder into a parlor game.”[7] And this largely sets the tone for the grimly witless spectacle. In practice it’s not even much of a parlor game—the film repeatedly stresses that only a surgeon with a detailed knowledge of human anatomy could possibly be the killer and the only character to fit that description is William Gull, an otherwise pointless-seeming character who shows up occasionally to give Inspector Abberline advice.

As for Abberline, the character is a strange composite of the inspector and Edward Lees, whereby he’s a cop who gets visions—accurate ones, thus precluding making things up to have them come true anyway. Played by Johnny Depp, the character is, in Moore’s words, “an absinthe-swilling, opium-den-frequenting dandy with a haircut that, in the Metropolitan Police force of 1888, would have gotten him beat up by the other officers.”[8] The romance between him and Marie Kelly, which in the book is so tentative that Campbell goes to considerable lengths not to show the face of the woman Abberline keeps chatting up at the pub, becomes a main plot, with Kelly helpfully signposted as the important one of the sex workers by the fact that all of the other ones are portrayed as impoverished grotesques while Kelly is groomed immaculately to Hollywood starlet standards.

Vestigial bits of the comic occasionally pop out—Gull directs one of his victim’s attention to Cleopatra’s Needle as he kills her, John Merrick makes a brief appearance, and the murders are said to be committed in locations forming a five-pointed star much like the one depicted in “What doth the Lord require of thee?” Gull even gets a brief allusion to the idea of birthing the twentieth century in the course of his villain monologue after being uncovered, which Ian Holm delivers with crumbs of scenery still falling from his mouth. But they exist in no context—not even a historical one, with the liberties taken extending far beyond changing Abberline from a portly middle aged copper to a tortured fop. The film’s actual interests extend no further than being a gaslit slasher flick, and a fairly mean-spirited one at that, treating its female characters as nothing more than bags of blood that can soon be splattered across the screen.

Nevertheless, the old rope sold, and for a decent chunk of change at that, giving Moore and Campbell the freedom needed to go and actually finish the beast.

[1] Jane Hamsher, Killer Instinct, “All the Oscars in the World Can’t Fix That Forehead”

[2] Quoted in Noah Murray, “Producer Don Murphy calls Alan Moore ‘a hypocrite’ and ‘a liar’,” The AV Club, https://www.avclub.com/producer-don-murphy-calls-alan-moore-a-hypocrite-and-1798215784

[3] Peter Murphy, “Eroto-Graphic Mania,” The New Review, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20130622182813/http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/alanmooreinterview.html

[4] Adam Rogers, “Legendary Comics Writer Alan Moore on Superheroes, The League, and Making Magic,” Wired, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20140809005358/https://archive.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/17-03/ff_moore_qa?currentPage=all

[5] HARDtalk, April 10, 2012, transcript provided privately

[6] HARDtalk, April 10, 2012, transcript provided privately

[7] Dirk Deppey, “The Eddie Campbell Interview,” The Comics Journal #273

[8] Jennifer Vineyard, “Alan Moore: The Last Angry Man,” mtv.com, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20060615045537/http://www.mtv.com/shared/movies/interviews/m/moore_alan_060315/