Lame Cherry: A Rambo in a Name

As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.

I'm always fascinated by dichotomy. It does not matter the situation, it just matters the "What If" and why did it happen this way.

I was reading a book about the North Korean leader, Kim John Il and his love of cinema and his propaganda ambitions which involved a South Korean dirertor named, Shin Sang Ok.

Ok was the father of South Korea's film industry which was full of censorship soon turned on Ok and literally banned him from making films. It was almost impossible to travel out of South Korea. For all matters , there was not much to be desired in being North or South Korean.

Ok was bankrupted, and was looking for a way to make movies again, where he eventually ended up in America where he wanted to adapt Sleeping Beauty to the big screen and became focused on a 1972 book whose name caught my attention in First Blood.

This was 1978 and this book's film rights in author David Morell had first been acquired for a large sum by Columbia Pictures. It was then sold for less to Warner Brothers and then languished as the hate of things American shifted the directors and scripts to following the basic leftist ideals of soldiers were insane and cops were thugs.

At this time the director Ok's estranged wife, Choi Eun Hee, was lured by North Korea to Hong Kong and kidnapped in an elaborate plan to sieze Ok to make movies for North Korea.

Ok was never able to obtain the script for First Blood and create his vision of John Rambo who would become a by word for a type of American, when Sylvester Stalone was offered the starring role and wrote the script for this movie as a sympathetic character, not a psycho.

I will meet you on the other side.

In 1972, Lawrence Turman at Columbia Pictures bought the film rights to First Blood for $175,000. Richard Brooks was slated to direct, and intended to have the film be an allegory on differing American perceptions of World War II and Vietnam War veterans, with Sheriff Teasle portrayed more sympathetically than in the novel. The film would have ended with Teasle ordering his men to drop their guns to try to reason with Rambo, who would have then been fatally shot by an unknown assailant. Brooks planned to start shooting First Blood in New Mexico in December 1972. The film did not proceed because the Vietnam War was still underway and Brooks left the project.
Afterward, John Calley purchased the rights at Warner Bros. Pictures for $125,000 with the thought of casting either Robert De Niro or Clint Eastwood as Rambo. A screenplay was written by Walter Newman with Martin Ritt intended to direct. The film would have criticized American military culture and portrayed Colonel Trautman as the film's villain, ending with both Rambo and Teasle dying. Sydney Pollack and Martin Bregman also considered directing the film, with Bregman hiring David Rabe to write a script. After Bregman departed Mike Nichols considered directing Rabe's script.
William Sackheim and Michael Kozoll wrote the screenplay that would be the basis of the final film in 1977, originally intending for John Badham to direct. Producer Carter DeHaven purchased Sackheim and Kozoll's script from Warner Bros. for $375,000. DeHaven secured the Cinema Group as a financer and hired John Frankenheimer as director with production to begin in Georgia. This was also the first version of the script in which Rambo survived the film. However, the project stalled again after the distributor Filmways was acquired by Orion Pictures.
After Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna of Anabasis Investments read the book, they got interested in doing an adaptation as the first production of their studio Carolco Pictures funded by "in-house sources". They purchased the film rights from Warner Bros. for $375,000 and Sackheim and Kozoll's script for $125,000 in 1981. Ted Kotcheff, who had been involved in the project in 1976, returned after Kassar and Vajna offered to finance one of his projects. Kotcheff offered the role of John Rambo to Sylvester Stallone, and the actor accepted after reading the script through in a weekend.^[8]
Various scripts adapted from Morrell's book had been pitched to studios in the years since its publication, but only Stallone's involvement prompted its production. The time since the end of the Vietnam War and Stallone's star power after the success of the Rocky films enabled him to rewrite the script to make the character of John Rambo more sympathetic. Morrell's book has Rambo kill many of his pursuers, and Kozoll and Sackheim's draft had him killing sixteen people, but in the movie Rambo does not directly cause the death of any police or national guardsmen. Stallone also decided to let Rambo survive the film, unlike in the book. A suicide scene was filmed but Kotcheff and Stallone opted to have Rambo turn himself in at Trautman's urging. Stallone did an estimated seven revisions of the script. Kotcheff requested further work be done on the script, which was performed by Larry Gross and David Giler.

One can imagine the weird character that John Rambo would have been as Robert DeNiro or how stiff Clint Eastwood would have made the Rambo character.

What I would be fascinated by is how would Shin Sang Ok have envisioned Rambo and the story where Rambo commits suicide in typical nutty soldier outcomes. Americans hate bad endings so that would have ended Rambo and the entire movie. But how would the Korean outlook have made John Rambo? Would it have swung to the Ninja type of noble warrior, who would die, or would it have been a wound reopened?
It is doubtful that Shin Sang Ok would have captured an ideal which would have had Rambo released into China. There never would have been a stepping stone for Sylvester Stallone from Rocky onto the world stage. Stallone needed this as all of his movies other than the first Rocky were drab.

It is a reality though that Ok would never have been in Hong Kong looking for his kidnapped wife if he was making Rambo. The reality is though that Ok could never match the team that wrote and rewrote the script to success and reshooting until it was right in that nucleus of the John Milius associates in his genius of talent and script.

I would have relished watching what Ok had created in First Blood as yes under Stallone it was kind of hokey, but it was a movie which understood Americans and dealt with the libel of Vietnam Veterans not being redeemable in the ludicrous scripts that they needed to be redeemed at all.

Sylvester Stallone has always presented a rather low IQ character. That hindered Rambo. There are always theories, but I believe if Ok would have presented a John Wayne type Rambo in a heroic form and cast an up and coming actor in Bill Paxton as John Rambo, Ok would have had a franchise.