The Buzz on ‘Lord of the Flies’ : Hollywood Tackles New Version of William Golding’s Nihilistic Thriller

Kill the Thing! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! ... Spill and kill and cut the MONSTER! Now! Now! Now!

--”Lord of the Flies,”Hollywood-style

The little ones are American, not British, this time.

They worry less about upholding some prep school code than missing out on “Alf” and breakfast tacos.

But the awful savagery of the story is coming to life again, with most of its frightening implications about evil that lurks in the hearts of children.

Hollywood--despite some initial doubts--is tackling “Lord of the Flies,” the controversial novel first published 34 years ago by Nobel Prize winner William Golding.

The film, which began shooting on a $9-million budget in Jamaica last month, will be distributed by Columbia Pictures, and backed by Castle Rock Entertainment--a company owned by “Stand By Me” director Rob Reiner and others. (Nelson Entertainment holds domestic video and foreign distribution rights.)

Hollywood’s version of Golding’s novel is being directed by 29-year-old Englishman Harry Hook (“The Kitchen Toto”). But its pitch promises to be distinctly American: In the screenplay written by Texas-born Jay Presson Allen, a band of young military school students, washed up on a tropical island, tumbles toward darkness with a disconcerting sense of fun.

“Die, Darth Vader,” howls one cadet, pretending to be a dueling Jedi when it’s all still a lark.

“Darth Vader conquers all!” retorts his adversary.

What follows is a widely known parable about good and evil. But it nonetheless prompted some unusual soul-searching among Castle Rock executives, who--on first considering the project--weren’t sure they could endorse Golding’s bleak, post-World War II view of human nature.

“The longest debate we had was, ‘Do we want to make the statement Golding makes?’ He has a nihilistic view, that man left to his own devices is left to evil,’ ” explains Castle Rock partner Alan Horn.

“When Golding wrote the book, he might have thought the world would inevitably destroy itself. Well, it hasn’t,” says Martin Shafer, also a partner in the production company.

Eventually, Horn, Reiner, Shafer and other Castle Rock executives persuaded Allen to soften some edges in her screenplay. Intimations that the children had somehow escaped a nuclear holocaust were eliminated. (“I wouldn’t want us to say the world could survive something like that,” Shafer says.) More important, Ralph, a good and reasonable boy who struggles for leadership with the wickedly charismatic Jack, was subtly beefed up and made more attractive.

But no major point in the novel was altered, a sine qua non insisted upon by “Lord of the Flies” producer Lewis Allen--who is Jay Allen’s husband, a friend of the 77-year-old author and also the producer of a low-budget, independent film based on the Golding book that was released to poor reviews but strong audience reception in 1963.

As Lewis Allen tells it, he optioned re-make rights to the original film in 1983, largely to ward off television movie-of-the-week producers who became interested in “Lord of the Flies” knock-offs when Golding received his Nobel Prize for literature that year.

Later, ICM agent Sam Cohn talked him into signing with the Ladd Co. to produce a new movie version based on a Jay Presson Allen screenplay. But the project languished when Alan Ladd Jr. dissolved his production company to become an MGM executive in 1985, and wasn’t revived until Creative Artists Agency’s Rosalie Swedlin matched the script up with Hook and Castle Rock two years later.

By Allen’s account, those difficulties were nothing compared with problems with the earlier film, which was originally to have been produced by the legendary Sam Spiegel. “There were nine different screenplays,” says Allen. “In each one, the boys got a little older. Then girls entered into it.” Finally, Spiegel insisted on a trick ending, in which boys and girls were to jump, hand in hand, across a chasm, on the other side of which they would somehow discover that their fears about an all-devouring beast were purely imaginary.

But Spiegel was soon distracted by his plans for “Lawrence of Arabia,” leaving Allen and director Peter Brook to make a modest, though substantially more genuine version of the book for $250,000, with a cast of young British amateurs.

The current film is similarly cast with 24 unknowns, ages 8 through 12, who were recruited from “baseball diamonds and Boy Scout rallies” around the country, according to Shafer. (Shafer and Horn say that their company wasn’t named after the Castle Rock that is a major setting in Golding’s book. The company name comes from Castle Rock, Ore., the imaginary town in Reiner’s “Stand By Me.”)

The movie is being shot in strict dramatic sequence, to season the young actors as they approach difficult, climactic moments at the end of the film.

If the earlier movie is any indication, the experience is likely to change them considerably. Though none of the young actors in the earlier movie went on to a major screen career, the parents of several later told the producer that they had “matured remarkably” as a result of working on the film, says Allen.

Allen says Golding will receive a percentage of any profit from the new film, even though he was previously paid in full for the book’s movie rights. He added that Golding has declined to read the new script, telling the producer: “You seem to have more interest in preserving the integrity of the book than I do.”

As it happens, the book remains standard reading among U.S. high school students, and is included on a model curriculum adopted several years ago for California students.

“I’ve always found it a stimulus for discussions that ran the gamut of moral and ethical questions,” says Juan Lara, a former high school teacher who is now assistant dean of UCLA’s Graduate School of Education.

Lara adds that contemporary movie executives are probably underestimating the ability of today’s young to cope with the full measure of Golding’s dark message. “Frankly, I’m amazed at the resilience of kids, at their ability to talk about the future.”