The Big Picture
The live-action adaptation of The Flintstones had a rocky production, involving 35 screenwriters over years of development. John Goodman felt “sandbagged” into playing Fred Flintstone and described shooting the film as “hot and sweaty.” The struggles to create an exciting new story for The Flintstones extended to other attempts to revive the franchise in the 21st century.
A live-action movie adaptation of The Flintstones sounds like it’d be an incredibly easy thing to craft. After all, there are countless seasons of the original TV show to draw from and these aren’t especially complex characters that require an intricate narrative to inhabit. However, in bringing these figures to the silver screen in 1994, director Brian Levant and company encountered tons of problems with breaking down a story for this proposed project. Fred Flintstone and his comrades may be a “modern stone-age family,” but for this creative team, they were more of a constant pain that never ceased to create headaches for a slew of Hollywood writers.
The problems in bringing The Flintstones to the movies were so persistent that the feature eventually involved 35 screenwriters over countless years of development. If one thought modern blockbusters like The Flash had an excessive number of screenwriters, they have nothing on The Flintstones! This slew of screenwriters paint a vivid picture of a TV show adaptation that struggled to justify its existence beyond cashing out on the Flintstones brand name. Needless to say, the production of this 1994 blockbuster was, as a Bedrock resident would put it, a rocky one.
The Earliest ‘Flintstones’ Scripts
Typically, when final writing credits are being hashed out for a finished film, the Writer’s Guild of America offers a deference to folks who were the first to put pen to paper and get the script rolling. In some cases, these individuals stuck with the project through its entire creative process, other times they were jettisoned after one draft. The role of these writers varies wildly from one project to the next, though typical WGA credit practices ensures they won’t be forgotten when the final cut of a movie is assembled. It’s a practice that guaranteed Steven E. de Souza one of the three final writing credits on The Flintstones after being the very first screenwriter involved in the project.
In a 1994 interview with Entertainment Weekly, de Souza confirmed his status as the inaugural Flintstones screenwriter and further claimed that the majority of the film’s jokes stemmed from his original draft. However, a separate Entertainment Weekly piece claimed that The Flintstones only gained momentum not when de Souza wrote the script, but when Amblin Entertainment secured the film rights to The Flintstones. Per a quote from Levant in this piece, Spielberg saw John Goodman on the set of Always, felt he’d be perfect to play a live-action incarnation of Fred Flintstone, and quickly moved to ensure his production company had the rights to this property. Allegedly, de Souza’s script and several other screenplays were all rejected by Spielberg in the ensuing years.
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This is when Levant opted to call in a slew of writers from famous sitcoms to try and hash out a story for a potential Flintstones movie. Eventually, throwing enough big TV writers at this project “worked” since a shooting script for The Flintstones emerged from all this chaos. Eventually, eight different screenwriters tried to get shared credit on the script, but the Writer’s Guild of America strongly discouraged this notion since it exceeded the number of writers (three individual people or three teams) that can be credited on a WGA-approved film. In the end, De Souza and the duo known as Tom S. Parker and Jim Jennewein scored the final writing credits. Per Entertainment Weekly, Jennewein wasn’t pleased with this development, telling the outlet that they “had no contact with the script after Levant came.” The Flintstones hired so many writers that even the final credited screenwriters had no real involvement with the final product!
This whole bizarre process (full of challenges with the WGA and a revolving door of sitcom writers) encapsulates what a messy production The Flintstones was. Born out of Spielberg’s fan-casting rather than an inspired idea on how to reinterpret these characters, all these writers struggled to crack just what a Flintstones movie even should look like. Some movies require endless creative struggles to reach their fullest potential, but The Flintstones is no Stanley Kubrick movie like Eyes Wide Shut. This was a case of IP exploitation, a precursor to modern-day cinematic plagues like live-action remakes of classic animated Disney movies. Endless problems in figuring out why a Flintstones movie should even exist should have told everyone involved that this was a cursed project.
John Goodman Had Mixed Feelings About ‘The Flintstones’
While looking back at his esteemed career with GQ, Goodman offered endless amazing anecdotes about working on films like The Big Lebowski. As for his work on The Flintstones, Goodman praised working with co-star Rick Moranis and the opportunity to meet comedy legend Jonathan Winters. However, he noted that he felt like he got “sandbagged” into the part after Spielberg suddenly announced at the first table read for Always that the director had “found [his] Fred Flintstone” in Goodman. From there, Goodman was basically forced into a role he openly noted he wasn’t stoked about playing. Reflecting on the part decades later, Goodman recalled shooting the film was “hot and sweaty.”
A sense of obligation appears to have permeated every aspect of The Flintstones, with the lasting pop culture legacy and marketability of these prehistoric characters informing the existence of the feature more than anything else. The struggles to get an exciting new story for the Flintstones isn’t just confined to this 1994 movie, though. Nearly all the 21st-century attempts to revive this franchise in some form have also gone kaput, plagued by the same creative problems that dogged this 1994 box office hit. In the early 2010s, for instance, Seth MacFarlane was tasked with creating a new animated sitcom version of The Flintstones for the Fox network, a project that eventually sputtered out. There have also been constant updates over the years on a new animated Flintstones movie from Warner Bros., but no such project has ever materialized.
The Flintstones were revolutionary in the 1960s. These characters established that animated comedy could work in prime-time television, paving the way for everything from The Simpsons to BoJack Horseman. However, what works in 1960s television isn’t going to necessarily work in the modern pop culture scene or even 1990s cinema for that matter. As the 1994 Flintstones movie showed, not even 30+ screenwriters can produce a gripping script based around a property whose time has come and gone. Best of luck to Elizabeth Banks and company on that forthcoming Bedrock TV show…as the original Flintstones movie showed, it takes more than bellowing “Yabba-Dabba-Doo!” to get a new update of this property off the ground.
The Flintstones is available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.
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