WARREN MURPHY & RICHARD SAPIR – Destroyer World: The Movie That Never Was. Unproduced screenplay based on the novel Created The Destroyer. Ballybunnion Books, trade paperback, 2004. Kindle edition currently available on Amazon.

   In the foreword of this book featuring Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir’s unsold spec screenplay, Warren Murphy explains how, when, and why they decided to write a screenplay based on their popular paperback series, The Destroyer.

   In the mid-1970s, after turning down Chuck Norris agent’s request for film rights (back when Norris was most known as a karate champion), Murphy and Sapir decided to try writing their own screenplay. The script shows their inexperience at the time with the movie business. For example, no professional screenwriter would include camera angles or instructions for the actors how to act.

   The script’s best feature is the Murphy and Sapir writing style that made the books so popular. Both understood their characters better than those involved with the 1985 film or the 1988 pilot for an ABC-TV series.

   Someone is starting riots in major American cities. Mr. Smith of top-secret organization CURE hires the Master of Sinanju to train CURE’s new lone assassin. The last Master of Sinanju, Chiun may look like a tiny frail old man, but he can walk up walls and rip apart steel with his hands.

   Selected to be CURE’s assassin, without his knowledge, Remo is framed and executed for murder. With Remo “dead,” Chiun trains Remo to become The Destroyer. Remo’s first case, if he is ever ready and willing, is to stop the madman behind the riots.

   Sadly, the script is a mess. The book begins where the would-be movie should have, with Remo’s “death.” Why is Conn MacCleary the focus of so much of the first half of the story? This movie should be about Remo and Chiun. Visually, Remo or Chiun or the bad guys should be in every scene.

   Most of the movie is over by the time Remo turns from jerk to hero and goes after the lame villain Buddy Bower, owner of a hamburger fast food chain, who plans to become President by creating civil unrest (his method for creating the riots would have been visually laughable).

   Murphy, in his foreword, wrote he thought what went wrong with the 1985 film Remo Williams was the lack of a Big Villain. A problem this script shared. Maybe Buddy Bower could have been a Big Villain if the script had spent more time showing him and his evil plan at work. Instead, the script had characters talk about the riots while showing such pointless scenes as the President deciding to approve CURE’s assassin, Chiun traveling on an airplane, and every detail of the frame of Remo including his trial.

   Why didn’t the script take the obvious path? After Remo “dies,” fetch Chiun, show more of Remo’s training and less talking, while visually establishing the evil power of the villain, and then send our hero out to stop the bad guy. If Murphy and Sapir’s script had followed that path, they might have created a Destroyer movie series to rival the 1970s Bond movies.