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Fury ©1995 Joseph A. Francis & Norma M. Jenckes
Full screenplay in pdf format here

Back in 1995 I was sitting in the courtyard of the Cat & Fiddle restaurant on a warm evening in Hollywood, immediately adjacent to my office at RGA/LA (now Imaginary Forces) thinking about the Umberto Eco book, The Name of the Rose. I was reflecting on how Eco had created a Medieval Sherlock Holmes, and I was wondering how the Sherlock Holmes story benefited from such a change of venue. As I let my mind wander I asked myself what other stories could be similarly transplanted. I wondered what it would be like if there were a Medieval... James Bond.

My mind started to race. I knew a fair amount about the history of technology from courses in college, and from an excellent series created by James Burke that I saw as a teenager back in '78 called Connections... What if I took James Bond and set him not in Medieval times, but in the Renaissance? Then I could make Leonardo da Vinci his 'Q' and supply him with all kinds of high tech 15th Century spy gear.

I couldn't believe it. It was so obvious, and yet no one had already done it.

We think of Bond as 'evergreen,' but he was languishing a bit then. Critics wondered if he had a future. I thought this might be a great way to re-imagine not the franchise, but the surrounding genre. There have been a lot of alternative spy stories since then, but in '95 they weren't so prevalent as they are today.

The 500th anniversary of Columbus's trip of 1492 had just past a few years back. The Renaissance was in the air. Women were wearing wrought iron cross jewelry. Bands like Enigma were paving the way to Clockpunk by combining medieval and Renaissance music with modern beats. The unofficial soundtrack in my mind to this film as I wrote it was the 1994 Vision: The Music of Hildegard von Bingen - particularly the song, Praise For The Mother (O Virga AC Diadema) In 1996 Renaissance Magazine was formed. A Renaissance-themed furniture store called Leonardo's opened on the 3rd Street promenade.

For me Steampunk, or more specifically in my case, Clockpunk, was a reaction to the 80's.

If you looked at the colors on the magazine covers on newsstands, they all seemed to warm up and lighten up almost simultaneously after 1989 ended. It was as if people we ready to let go of dark futures, and blues and blacks and silvers, and embrace sunny warm gold and brass and wood.

I thought selling this script would be a no brainer. But I never did sell it.

I had offers to sell the pitch, but I was holding out for a screenplay sale. I had a fair amount of access from my work in the visual effects industry, and the script got optioned here and there. One thing I did get from it was an offer to write and direct an animated CG feature based on a Sega Genesis videogame character called Vectorman. More on that here.

I have seen pop culture catch up to this story, and I don't see any reason to sit on it anymore. I discussed it a bit on the Da Vinci Automata web site, but with this post today I am making the script itself public.

At the head of this post is a link to a pdf. The screenplay at that link is the original version of Fury. The plot is as follows:

A Renaissance-era superspy, equipped with the latest 15th Century high tech espionage gear courtesy of a young Leonardo da Vinci, must stop a madman who has inadvertently stumbled across germ theory centuries early and realizes he can hold cities for ransom by threatening them with the return of the Plague.

Post 9/11 I felt the need to rewrite the script and tone down some of the Venetian / Ottoman, Christian / Muslim conflict.

In a later draft (not presented above), the villain, the first mafia don, is inventing the concept of organized crime when he discovers an ancient and highly destructive Chinese magnetically-powered rail gun called by various names throughout history, but most famously called 'The Horn of the Ram,' when it brought down the walls of Jericho. The Bible mistranslates it as Joshua blowing a ram's horn to bring down the walls.

I also added the military group The 10 of War, headed by Machiavelli. (In addition to Machiavelli's own writing, The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene was a great resource.) The villain's 'woman' in the revised screenplay is Lucrezia Borgia.

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Fury ©1995 Joseph A. Francis & Norma M. Jenckes
Full screenplay in pdf format here

SEGA'S "VECTORMAN" SET TO MORPH ONTO THE SILVER SCREEN

VECTORMAN (1997) showbizdata.com

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In 1996 I was commissioned to write a screenplay for a CG animated feature film starring a Sega Genesis videogame character called Vectorman. I tried to be faithful to the game's material, but at the same time treat it in a fairly serious way - finding plausible explanations for some of the more fanciful aspects of the game, like winged fire extinguishers. It actually had a little bit of a WALL-E thing going on.

I was also attached to direct the film. Had it gone into production I believe it would have been the world's second CG film - after Toy Story.

How did I get a gig like that? Partially because of my work on ID4. But largely because of my first screenplay, a 1995 work that independently invented Clockpunk, and, I guess, Plaguepunk, too.

I mainly posting about Vectorman now as a way of segueing into my next post, which will address the Clockpunk thing in some detail.

In the meantime... ; )

Destructoid - Daily irrelevance: VectorMan was going to be a movie once

Vectorman fans: Did you know there was a movie in the works?

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SEGA'S "VECTORMAN" SET TO MORPH ONTO THE SILVER SCREEN

Sega of America is the arm of Tokyo, Japan-based Sega Enterprises Ltd. responsible for the development, marketing and distribution of Sega videogame systems and videogames in the Americas. Sega Enterprises Ltd. is a nearly $3.6 billion company known as the industry leader in interactive digital entertainment media, and is the only company that offers entertainment experiences both inside and outside the home. Sega of America's World Wide Web site is located at (http://www.sega.com).

Cinefex Magazine 89 -- The Shape of Things to Come. A 19,000 word article I wrote on the visual effects work in the 2002 film, The Time Machine. Author Joseph Francis.

Here's a 6000 word article I wrote for Cinefex Magazine which discusses the visual effects work in the feature film, Clockstoppers.

Clockstoppers by Joseph Francis, Cinefex Magazine.

Siggraph 2005 begins today.

I'm inspired to dig out a column I wrote about SIGGRAPH '97 for the industry trade paper, Backstage/SHOOT.

This is how I saw it then: