To be fair to Farmer (who did not go on to have a successful career in Hollywood, so it’s a little mean to keep kicking this corpse), his draft of “Sandman” appears to have been written absent any foreknowledge of Gaiman’s comic. Most likely, this guy was handed an assignment from notoriously spacey/combative producer Jon Peters and did as he was told.
Peters, a motor-mouthed hairdresser who charmed Barbara Streisand into granting him entree to the upper echelon of the Hollywood studio power structure (in the early 1990s, he conned Sony into letting him run their recently acquired Columbia Pictures with his partner Peter Guber), didn’t know the first thing about comic books. How could he? He was illiterate. But he lucked his way into enough high-profile hits to land a non-exclusive deal with Warner Bros. in 1994. He controlled “Superman” and had final say on a film adaptation of “Sandman.” And while he had no idea how to make these movies work, he was fixated on one element: they had to have a giant mechanical spider.
Now that “Sandman” is hanging around in Netflix’s global top 10, Gaiman has loosened up a bit, which means he’s finally dishing on something I’ve had to keep quiet about for over 20 years.
