Some Things Aren't Meant To Be

We all have our disappointments in life -- relationships that ended badly, or connections that weren't made -- but when you're a writer you tend to carry around with you all the projects that you once wanted to write but for one reason or another never jelled, or that were abandoned before completion.

I was reminded of one of these projects by a news story that has recently made it onto the Associated Press.

The AP is reporting that the body of Harry Houdini, the handcuff king, is being exhumed to find out whether or not he died, not from peritonitis derived from a punch in the stomach as was thought at the time, but from poison. It's alleged that Houdini's enemies in the spiritualist world, incensed by his debunking of mediums and charlatans who claimed to contact those in the great beyond, had him killed with arsenic.

This reminds me of a project I wanted to write more than 20 years ago. I was musing one day over the career of one of America's greatest filmmakers, and it occurred to me in my twentysomething wisdom that his biggest problem with the American film industry was that he'd never had a hit. One huge hit, I thought at the time, could give a jump start to a directing career that badly needed it.

And at the time (this was the mid-80s) the perfect actor was at just the right age to play the lead in this hypothetical film. You combine the director, the actor, the part and the subject matter and you had, I thought, the making of a great film.

The film was to be on the life of Houdini. The actor was to have been Robert DeNiro. And the director was to have been Orson Welles.

Just the idea of Orson Welles, whose interest in magic was well known and who had actually met Houdini as a child, directing a film about Houdini with DeNiro in the lead was so great an idea that I thought it might actually happen. I would have hoped to write it myself but even if I didn't, I would have been happy just to see the film get made.

But it wasn't meant to be. As I was about to attempt to contact Orson Welles and pitch the idea to him, he died at the age of 70. There was not point trying to pitch the idea with any other director. What would have been the point?

So hearing that Houdini's death might have been a murder mystery makes me even more -- what's the word? -- nostalgic for a film that never saw the light of day, or even existed except as an idea in my head. And now in yours.

Tom Moran