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Dharma
Blue: The UFO Movie That Never Was
by Dennis Stacy
Hollywood wunderkind producer Don Simpson died on
January 19th of this year in his Stone Canyon LA house of apparently
natural causes, according to a preliminary statement issued by the
office of the Los Angeles Medical Examiner, and as reported in the
February 5 issue of "The New Yorker" by John Gregory Dunne.
Dunne, husband of Joan Didion, is the upscale
author and sometimes screenplay writer who covered the O. J. Simpson
trial for "Vanity Fair." The late non-related Simpson, in conjunction
with co-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, was responsible for a string of
lucrative cinematic successses (worth well more than a billion dollars
total) that included "Flashdance," "Top Gun," "Beverly Hills Cop" and
its Eddie Murray-starring sequel.
Unlike most of the postmordem, public-pulse puff
pieces regading Simpson's death that appeared in "People," "Time"
magazine and other media sources (the producer's drug and sexual
excesses were legendary even by Hollywood standards), Dunne's article
speaks from personal experience, which is where we here at The
Anomalist intertwine.
Not that any of your humble scribes here claim to
have ever met the aforementioned magesterial celebrities, mind, just
that we find fascinating Dunne's revelations that Simpson's last work
in progress was a project called "Dharma Blue," an idea, in Dunne's
words, "based on an original story by Simpson, about a forty-year
government coverup of U.F.O. sightings."
While Simpson and Bruckheimer must have conceived
of the idea sometime in 1991, it was only in late February of 1992 that
Dunne and Didion were brought into the picture as potential scripters
of a subject of which they knew little about. By way of background,
however, they soon received from Simpson "a massive amount of
material," according to Dunne, consisting of the following:
". . . back issues of the magazine UFO, a copy of
the Encyclopedia of Personal Surveillance (Book II: 'How to Get
Anything on Anybody'), a Nexis cache of newspaper and magazine clips, a
tape of a '60 Minutes' segment about a cashiered U. S. Navy officer
whose elite SEAL unit had tested the security of Air Force One and
several nuclear submarines by trying to break into them, usually
successfully. There were videotapes of possible U.F.O. sightings, a
bibliography of two hundred U.F.O. books, the listed and unlisted
telephone numbers of U.F.O. researchers, a Las Vegas TV interview with
a scientist who claimed he had worked at a top-secret military facility
near Mercury, Nevada, where he said he had seen evidence of a
government-sponsored U.F.O. coverup (that the scientist was part owner
of a legal Nevada brothel compromised his bona fides), catalogues of
U.F.O. trade shows, and transcripts of U.F.O. symposia, featuring the
arguments of both U.F.O. debunkers and the true believers, called
Ufologists."
The outline of the script Dunne and Didion came
up with is not exactly awe-inspiring. As described, it amounts to
little less than a slightly more literate version of the execrable (and
highly expendable) "Hangar 18" of a few years back. To make an already
long story short, the Simpson-inspired version of Dharma Blue never
made it to the silver screen--and hopefully never will. In its final
terminal stages the project was renamed "Zone of Silence," presumably
after the landlocked (and so-called) Mexican equivalent of the alleged
Bermuda Triangle. Which is another story altogether.
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