Many of you know the story of Godzilla: King of the Monsters in 3D‘s production from our previous first draft of the script. Fred Dekker (The Monster Squad) was tapped to write the script with storyboards and production design led by the iconic William Stout. Interestingly, as the drafts continued to be written, the film was changed to be a 2D picture in concept. Below is the third draft, plus an additional bonus revised third draft, for kaiju fans to enjoy. We’d like to extend special thanks to Tue Duy Nguyen, a very generous donor. for providing us these two screenplays.
According to Tue Duy Nguyen, during his talk with William Stout, the maestro said:
I was the film’s production designer, responsible for everything you would see on the screen except for the performances of the actors (sets, creature design, prop design, costumes, special effects, etc.).
I drew and painted presentation art of the film’s key scenes, redesigned Godzilla, storyboarded a lot of the film and began signing up a dream crew. Stephen Czerkas built the stop motion articulated animation figure of Godzilla based upon my designs.
David Allen was slated to do the stop motion animation. Rick Baker was hired to build a gigantic robotic head of Godzilla. I hired Dave Stevens and Doug Wildey to help out with the storyboards. We ended up boarding pretty much the entire film.
Steve Miner pitched the film to every studio. None were willing to take it on because it was going to be a big, expensive Spielberg-style film, and at that time four big budget films (including Heaven’s Gate,) tanked. I worked on the movie for two years.
We eventually decided that shooting the film in 3-D was going to be too costly, so we began re-thinking of the film as a 2-D movie. Steve took this project to every major studio. After working his way up the chain of command he would always get a “No” when he finally made it to the top.
We did get an offer from Peter Guber (at Warner Brothers, I seem to recall) that Steve considered too low. Steve now regrets not taking that offer.