Wild Wild West

Development

Variety first reported in January 1992 that Warner Bros. Pictures had optioned the film rights to Michael Garrison's television show The Wild Wild West, and hired Richard Donner, who previously directed three episodes of the original series, to direct a film adaptation written by Shane Black, with Mel Gibson in the role of Jim West. However, Donner and Gibson left the project to work on a film adaptation of Maverick (another film based on a Western television series) in 1994. The project continued in the development stage, with Tom Cruise rumored for the lead in 1995. Cruise instead starred in a film adaptation of Mission: Impossible the following year.^[5]

Discussions with Will Smith and Barry Sonnenfeld began in February 1997 after the two had wrapped up production on Men in Black for Columbia Pictures the same year.^[6] Smith declined to play the lead role of Neo in The Matrix in favor of Wild Wild West, which he later regretted.^[7] Warner Bros. pursued George Clooney to co-star in the film as Artemus Gordon, with Kevin Kline, Matthew McConaughey and Johnny Depp also in contention for the role while Short Circuit and Tremors screenwriters S. S. Wilson and Brent Maddock were hired by the studio to script the film between April and May 1997.^[8] Clooney signed on the following August after dropping out of Jack Frost, while Wilson and Maddock's script was rewritten by the writing team of Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman.^[9] However, in December 1997, Clooney was replaced by Kline in the role of Gordon after an agreement with Sonnenfeld: "Ultimately, we all decided that rather than damage this project trying to retrofit the role for me, it was better to step aside and let them get someone else."^[10]

Writing

The film featured several significant changes from the television series. For instance, Dr. Loveless, as portrayed by Kenneth Branagh in the film, went from a dwarf to a legless man confined in a steam-powered wheelchair similar to that employed by the villain in the episode "The Night of the Brain"; his first name was also changed from Miguelito to Arliss, and he was given the motive of a Southerner who sought the defeat of the North after the Civil War. Kevin Kline plays Artemus Gordon in the film, whose character is similar to the original show's version of him portrayed by Ross Martin, except that he is much more egotistical than Jim West. The film depicted Kline's Gordon creating more bizarre, humorous and implausible inventions than those created by Martin's Gordon in the original series, as well as having an aggressive rivalry with West, unlike in the series where he and West had a very close friendship and trusted each other with their lives. While Gordon did indeed impersonate Grant in three episodes of the series ("The Night of the Steel Assassin", "The Night of the Colonel's Ghost" and "The Night of the Big Blackmail"), they were not played by the same actor. Additionally, West was originally portrayed by Robert Conrad, a Caucasian rather than an African American, which serves as a critical plot point as West's parents were among the victims of Loveless's massacre at New Liberty.

In a 2002 Q&A event on An Evening with Kevin Smith, filmmaker Kevin Smith talked about working as a writer on a fifth Superman film in 1997 titled Superman Lives, revealing that producer Jon Peters requested, among other things, that Superman fight a gigantic spider in the third act.^[11] After Batman director Tim Burton came onboard the project, Smith's script was scrapped and Warner Bros. later halted production on Superman Lives in 1998, though Wild Wild West, which Peters produced alongside Sonnenfeld, featured a giant mechanical spider that Dr. Loveless takes control of.^[12] Neil Gaiman also revealed that Peters insisted a giant mechanical spider be included in a proposed film adaptation of The Sandman.^[13]

Filming

Principal photography was set to begin in January 1998, but was pushed three months later to April 22, 1998.^[14] The interior sequences on the trains of both Artemus Gordon and Dr. Loveless were shot on sets at Warner Bros. Studios Burbank, while the exterior sequences were shot in Idaho on the Camas Prairie Railroad. The Wanderer in the film is portrayed by the Baltimore & Ohio 4–4–0 No. 25, one of the oldest operating steam locomotives in the U.S. Built in 1856 at the Mason Machine Works in Taunton, Massachusetts, it was later renamed The William Mason in honor of its manufacturer.^[15] During preproduction, the engine was sent to the steam shops at the Strasburg Rail Road for restoration and repainting.^[15] The locomotive is brought out for the B&O Train Museum in Baltimore's "Steam Days". Both the William Mason and the Inyo, which was the locomotive used in the original television series, previously appeared in the 1956 Disney film The Great Locomotive Chase.

Much of the Wild West footage was shot around Santa Fe, New Mexico, particularly at the Western town film set at the Cook Movie Ranch (now Cerro Pelon Ranch), which was previously used for the 1985 film Silverado. During the shooting of a sequence involving stunts and pyrotechnics, a planned building fire grew out of control and quickly overwhelmed the local fire crews that were standing by. Much of the town was destroyed before the fire was contained.^[16] In the scene where Loveless' spider attacks the town, a chimney reading "Kasdan Iron Monger" is briefly shown as a homage to Silverado director Lawrence Kasdan.^[17]

Music

The orchestral film score, including its main theme, was composed and conducted by Elmer Bernstein, a veteran of many Western film scores such as The Magnificent Seven. The score mainly follows the Western genre's symphonic tradition, while at times also acknowledging the film's anachronistic playfulness by employing a more contemporary music style with notable rock percussion and electronic organ. The score also briefly incorporates Richard Markowitz's theme from the original television series in one cue, which was uncredited in the film and not included on the score's album; ironically, this was one of the film's few elements that were faithful to the series, which also did not credit Markowitz for the theme. Additional parts of the score were composed by Bernstein's son Peter, while his daughter Emilie served as one of the orchestrators and producers.

Like most of his films during this period, Will Smith recorded a hip hop song based on the film's plot, also titled "Wild Wild West". "Wild Wild West" was a number-one hit on the U.S. pop charts, though it also won a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Original Song. It was produced by Rob Fusari, who lifted a sample from Stevie Wonder's 1976 hit "I Wish". The song also features guest vocals from R&B group Dru Hill, and was a star-making vehicle for Dru Hill lead singer Sisqó. Old-school rapper Kool Moe Dee had previously recorded a "Wild Wild West" single of his own in 1987, and he reperformed the chorus from his "Wild Wild West" as the chorus of Smith's "Wild Wild West". A performance of the song by Smith, Dee, Dru Hill and Sisqo at the 1999 MTV Movie Awards also included Wonder performing a reprise of the chorus on piano.^[18]

Score Deluxe Edition

Marketing

Warner Bros. heavily promoted Wild Wild West as an anticipated summer blockbuster instead of Brad Bird's animated film The Iron Giant, which was released two months after Wild Wild West. This sparked controversy as The Iron Giant was becoming more critically successful than the critically-panned Wild Wild West upon release, despite eventually underperforming at the box office due to the studio deciding to spend their money on marketing for Wild Wild West among other films.^[21][22]

Home media

The film was released on VHS and DVD on November 30, 1999, on LaserDisc on December 28, 1999,^[23] and on Blu-ray on May 29, 2011.^[24]

Box office

Wild Wild West grossed $27,687,484 during its opening weekend, with a total of $40,957,789 for the Independence Day weekend and ranking first at the North American box office.^[25][26] It dropped into second place below American Pie in its second weekend, making $16.8 million.^[27][28] The film ended its theatrical run on October 10, 1999 after five months, having grossed $113,804,681 domestically and $108,300,000 overseas for a worldwide total of $222,104,681 against a production budget of $170 million, making it commercially unsuccessful.^[2]

Critical response

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 16% of 131 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 4.1/10. The website's consensus reads: "Bombastic, manic, and largely laugh-free, Wild Wild West is a bizarre misfire in which greater care was lavished upon the special effects than on the script."^[29] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 40 out of 100, based on 25 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.^[30] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale.^[31]

Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times gave the film one star out of four, writing that "Wild Wild West is a comedy dead zone. You stare in disbelief as scenes flop and die. The movie is all concept and no content; the elaborate special effects are like watching money burn on the screen."^[32] Janet Maslin of The New York Times gave the film a negative review, saying that it "leaves reality so far behind that its storytelling would be arbitrary even by comic-book standards, and its characters share no common ground or emotional connection."^[33]

Robert Conrad, who played Jim West in the original series, was highly critical of the film. While he had no problem with the film depicting West as an African American rather than a Caucasian, he felt Will Smith was miscast as the character, saying he would have preferred an actor with "a Wesley Snipes body with a Denzel Washington head" for the role. He further stated he would have preferred either Kevin Spacey or Gary Sinise for the role of Artemus Gordon instead of Kevin Kline, and objected to the film's depiction of Dr. Loveless, who was a dwarf in the series, as an amputee.^[34]

Accolades

Wild Wild West later ranked in the listed bottom 20 of the Stinkers' "100 Years, 100 Stinkers" list (which noted the 100 worst films of the 20th century) at #2, but lost to Battlefield Earth.^[36][37]