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A Mind’s Eye Theater Production of: Kevin Smith’s “The Six Million Dollar Man”

This little gem was sent to me by one of the members of the ‘Black Watch’. Before you fans of the Kevster get your hopes up, I’ve gotta hurt you: this take of TSM$M is dead. Dead dead dead. It’s really dead, Jim.

History: Back in ’96 Kevin Smith (director/writer of Chasing Amy and the forthcoming Dogma) was hired to pen a draft adapting the 70’s action/adventure series The Six Million Dollar Man to the big screen. In interviews Smith did around that time he acknowledged that he was a fan of Steve Austin; point out any male in their mid-twenties who isn’t. Aha! Wasn’t that easy, was it? So Kevin’s a fan and he’s been lauded for his film work — of course he takes the job. He writes up his vision of a 90’s TSM$M film, hands it in September 1, 1996. And it goes bionically nowhere.

Details: The script opens with a horde of ninjas infiltrating one of the O.S.I.’s Bionics division buildings, raiding the latest bionics technology. Leading the group is an individual who’s half-man, half-machine but all psychopath — KLATCH. He kills the guards, nabs the bounty and disappears into the night.

Next, we meet Steve Austin as he prepares to test fly the experimental Daedelus Five fighter. Steve’s one of those guys who’s got cosmic horseshoes falling out of his you-know-where. Good looking. Brave. Adventurous. And he’s engaged to a shapely fifth-grade teacher by the name of Jaime Summers. Steve’s life looks to be pretty good: after testing out the Daedalus he’s giving up the profession to settle down with Ms. Summers. Steve’s best friend, Oscar Goldman, is there to see him off. We’re introduced to Rudy Wells, Steve’s doctor, who gives him the thumbs up. After a few scenes Steve’s in the air, pushing and then shattering Mach 8. He’s still the golden boy.

Like the son of the legendary Daedalus, so too does Steve fall from the sky. It’s here’s when you know Smith is speaking directly to the same twenty-somethings who know why Steve Austin, a character who comes from a time when he was turned into an action-figure after he had a television show, will remain cool to us no matter which decade we live in now: he makes sure to include that, in Smith’s own words, “the immortal words are spoken” — “I CAN’T HOLD IT! SHE’S BREAKING UP! SHE’S BREAKING UP!!!”

And so the stage is set. Smith plays out the rest of Steve’s bionic origin, including having the broken man go through the horror of becoming nothing more than a stub of the former person he was. And in case you were wondering, yes, Smith also updates on the 70s goofball science when Austin finally agrees to become a bionic man (through the technological breakthroughs ‘Project: Six Million’ has discovered.) And again, here’s where the strength of the Smith interpretation is felt: he lovingly lays out the foundation of what the TV series utilized (a man with a bionic arm, two legs and one eye) and updates it so it’s got a new coat of paint. Even though they’re still attached, the majority of the remainder of Steve’s surviving biological parts (his good arm, eye and spine for starters) are removed and replaced with bionic ones. In a voiceover given by Oscar, he explains that no ordinary human could survive a mixture of organic and bionic parts: Steve must be completely re-build from the ground up if he’s going to survive. In four-and-a-half pages of detailed, cool explanation, Oscar Goldman is our bridge from the nolstagic to the modern age. Smith re-invents the concept of Steve’s bionics, explains them and also gives us new bionics (such as Steve’s newfound ability to ‘morph’ his face into another person’s features, including skin pigment) — and he manages to pull this off and keep the ever-familiar words Goldman spoke during the opening credits of the series:

“Colonel Steve Austin. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we’re going to rebuild him. We have the technology. We’re going to recreate the world’s first, fully functional Bionic Man. Steve Austin will be that man.”

By page fifty-five, Kevin’s got me lined up on opening night.

By now Steve needs to start moving into the film’s main storyline, which means he’ll be confronting Klatch soon enough. Through a couple of missions that show us Steve’s new abilities we also learn more about who and what Klatch was. We are there when the new Steve confronts Jaime, who believes him to be dead (and a nice nod/bit of foreshadowing is given to the Bionic Woman spin-off.) The origins of the bionics program, and its roots in one of this century’s most horrifying events, are also laid bare. When Steve finally understands why Klatch has been stealing the OSI’s Bionics technology, and once Klatch’s Bondian-like scheme is fully unveiled, the film reads more like the last quarter of Schwarzenegger’s True Lies or Mission: Impossible the movie: cool superhero-inspired spy action comes flying at you. And the modern OSI comes off as a lot more sinister than it’s disco-era counterpart. Everywhere you look in the script you’ll find the cool bits and pieces you know in your heart you want to see in the film but your grown-up sensibilities would disapprove of. It doesn’t matter — Smith pulls it all off and sneaks all the fanboy stuff in there. When he needs to revision the idea, he does it so it doesn’t cross that mental hokey line your brain stands ready to issue. For Pete’s sake — there’s even a scene with Max, the bionic dog…and it works within the script’s context!

With the right director and actors as Steve Austin and Klatch this has got all the elements necessary to become a big holiday hit. So why didn’t it become one??

Again, Smith hinted at reasons in his previous interviews, but the most-likely answer seems to be the hardest to comprehend: it wasn’t developed in time. And everyone in Hollywood knows that any project that lags behind in development automatically connotes to the script that’s presently in place. If the project doesn’t move forward within a certain amount of time, it begins to look stale: time to bring in another writer. There are many reasons why a script seems to go nowhere: they can’t attach a star to it, or the concept is too grandiose to bring feasibly in on budget, or maybe it’s just simply a string of bad luck. In any case, Smith’s script didn’t advance past the starting gate.

We’ve heard (though not confirmed) that writer Joss Whedon (Alien Resurrection, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) was either doing a rewrite or a new take on the franchise sometime after Smith had left the project. Since that time the latest scoop we received about the project (May ’98) is that writer John Pogue is on-board. We’ve no idea if all of Smith’s script has been jettisoned or if Pogue is just doing re-writes, but one tip leads us to believe Pogue is doing more than just a small writing tune-up: the film may now be titled ‘The Six (or ‘Seven’, depending on who you talk to) Billion Dollar Man’.

I give Smith’s interpretation of The Six Million Dollar Man an A- on my potential scale. It revved me up wanting to see this up on the big screen, but for now I’ll have to settle with the copy screening in my mind’s eye.

Patrick Sauriol
Creator, Chief Content Writer & Director
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