Tales From Development Hell: The Thief and the Cobbler
- cepmurphywrites
- 40 minutes ago
- 9 min read
By Ryan Fleming.
There are some films whose development hell has made them infamous, usually for ruining what could have been a good film. Then there are those whose development hell has made them legendary.
We’ve touched upon a couple of these in this series already: A Confederacy of Dunces and Atuk. What these legendarily troubled productions often have in common is that they were never released. Then there’s Richard Williams’ The Thief and the Cobbler, which began work in 1964 and acquired something of a legendary reputation, but was finally released in, unfinished and re-edited, in 1993, after Williams had been forced out. Despite frequent attempts, including one from Roy E. Disney, to restore the film to the original version, the closest has been Garrett Gilchrist’s The Recobbled Cut and Persistence of Vision, a 2012 documentary on the film.
Could it have been completed at any time in the interceding 29 years?
The Thief and the Cobbler began life as Nasrudin, named for the Muslim folkloric figure. Williams had illustrated books by Idries Shah which collected stories of the character and together they would originally work on the film.
After a falling out over finances, the partnership between Williams and the Shahs broke down in the early 1970s. The end result was that the Shahs kept the rights to the Nasrudin stories whilst Williams kept the character designs he did for the illustrations and the film. The redesigned film would feature a clumsy cobbler, a persistent thief, a sleepy king, an evil vizier, and a princess. The characters that would become the titular Thief and the Cobbler would be mostly silent throughout the film, taking inspiration from silent comedies. Silent comedy stars like Charlie Chaplin and Harry Langdon would inform the design of these characters.
There was a desire from Williams to avoid comparisons to the animated films of Disney. It was the perceived decline in animation during the 1960s that inspired the epic scope and artistry of The Thief and the Cobbler. Despite this, seeing Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967) convinced Williams he still had much to learn as an animator. Production on The Thief and the Cobbler was never exactly halted during any of these difficulties, but it only ever preceded at in small bursts.
A large part of the reason for that was the lack of financial backing. Even when the Shahs were on-board championing Nasrudin, Williams still self-financed the project from his work on animating television, films, and advertisements. Cost-cutting efforts were made such as all the work of the animators being kept in the pencil stage of rough drawings, with the intention to go back and add colour, special effects, and camera work at a later stage. The ambition grew throughout the 1970s. Eventually Saudi prince Mohammed bin Faisal Al Saud agreed in 1978 to fund a short test sequence for $100,000. The resulting sequence was delivered in 1979, missing two deadlines, and $150,000 over budget.
These would be recurring themes throughout Williams’ career. Faisal was positively inclined towards the footage but declined to provide further support, citing the lateness and cost overruns. Despite continuing to self-finance, Williams continued to produce and promote The Thief and the Cobbler, or The Thief Who Never Gave Up, or Once…, as it was called at different times throughout its long production.
Throughout the years, the film acquired a motley crew of contributors. Ken Harris had been a long-time animator at Warner Bros and animated many famous Looney Tunes under the legendary director Chuck Jones. He also collaborated with Friz Freleng on the animated titles for The Pink Panther (1963), had a cup of coffee at Hanna-Barbera, and worked on How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966) before joining Williams’ London-based studio in 1967. He was the longest tenured contributor on The Thief and The Cobbler beyond Williams himself, bringing something of Wile E. Coyote to the eponymous thief. The film was still unfinished at the time of Harris’ death in 1982. This was a recurring trend for many of the veterans from the Golden Age of Animation that Williams had brought to his studio: Emery Hawkins, Grim Natwick, and Art Babbit, whose combined experience included animating at Disney, Fleischer Studios, MGM, Walter Lantz, and Warner Bros., would not see their efforts completed before their deaths in 1989, 1990, and 1992 (respectively). As the intended film changed throughout the years, some of the sequences from these legendary animators did not fit well with the new direction, but Williams always wanted to retain their efforts despite how much time had passed.
As the 20th anniversary of the production came and went, The Thief and the Cobbler was still had no release on the horizon. It had already become the stuff of legend within the industry, and that legend attracted interest.
Amongst those attracted to financing The Thief and the Cobbler during the 1980s were Gary Kurtz, producer of Star Wars (1977) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Jake Eberts, producer of Chariots of Fire (1981) and Gandhi (1982). The winning bid would not come for The Thief and the Cobbler itself, however. Instead, Williams was hired by Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis to direct the animation of the latter’s film Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). His hiring was based entirely on Spielberg being impressed with test footage of Thief.
Though Roger Rabbit went over budget, it happened before Williams began his efforts on it, so he had personally proven his ability to work within a studio system and to deadline. The film was also a massive critical and commercial success. (It’s not talked about enough how Steven Spielberg had so much clout in the 1980s that he was able to get Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse to appear together in the same film!) For his efforts, Williams was awarded both a Special Achievement Award and Best Visual Effects for he and his team at the 61st Academy Awards. He had also been told, in return for doing the film, that Disney, who distributed Roger Rabbit under their Touchstone banner, and Spielberg would finance and distribute Thief. Neither party would play a part in that film’s eventual release.
Disney had been in a period of doldrums since Walt’s death. Their animated efforts faced stiff competition after Don Bluth left in 1981 to set up his own rival studio, Don Bluth Productions; the two studios competed in 1986 with Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective against Bluth’s An American Tail, in which the Bluth effort was more successful. An American Tail was also executive produced by Spielberg. The two studios would compete again in 1988 between Disney’s Oliver and Company and Bluth’s The Land Before Time. Here, the competition was more inconclusive with Oliver winning the box office in the United States but Land becoming the highest grossing globally. Following the renewed success of these animated films and Roger Rabbit, Disney began to put more attention into their animated features, with the result being the Disney Renaissance.
Amongst the films of the Renaissance was Aladdin (1992), an animated musical adaptation of a Middle Eastern folk tale. That film was first pitched in 1988, whilst The Thief and the Cobbler still languished in production. Suddenly, it was facing some stiff competition.
Spielberg formed his own competing animation studio, Amblimation, following a parting of the ways with Bluth and the new company began work on a sequel to An American Tail. Williams could still trade off his success to get Thief completed, even if it was not to be with Disney or Spielberg. A deal was agreed with Warner Bros. in 1988. When a 1991 deadline came and went, there was still 10-15 minutes of animation to complete, expected to take another six months approximately. Warner Bros, coming off a few unsuccessful animated feature films like The Nutcracker Prince (1990) and Rover Dangerfield (1991), refused.
The film would be completed not by Williams but by the Completion Bond Company. The CBC was a guarantor for Warner Bros. completion insurance on the film, with the right to take over production if time or budget standards are not met since they would be financially liable otherwise. A rough screening of the film was not well received by Warner Bros, the CBC took over completely, and Williams was ejected from a project he had spent a quarter of a century on.
The Thief and the Cobbler was turned into a typical animated musical adventure, with a romance subplot and the silent characters given voices. In the saddest of ironies, when released both as The Princess and the Cobbler in 1993 or as Arabian Knight in a 1995 re-edit, most audiences thought it was a rip off of Aladdin.
Could the film have had a different fate? Could The Thief and the Cobbler have been completed and released under Williams’ direction at any point during its long and troubled production?
The completion of a film that meandered along for two decades suddenly becoming a sprint to be completed on the clock of a major Hollywood studio likely doomed the effort. By Williams’ own admission, it would have been better if they had just taken their time and gone back to Europe for another five years of production independently then sought a distributor after completion. This would have kept the original vision intact, but even then, it faces the unenviable task of facing stiff competition from a far slicker operation that might have much more mainstream appeal in the shape of Aladdin.
The dog that doesn’t bark in the night is the possibility of Spielberg remaining on board after his partnerships with both Bluth and Disney peter out. Amblimation was based in London, where William’s studio was also based. However, it also poached animator artist Simon Wells from Williams. Perhaps the director and the animator did not see a harmonious collaboration, or perhaps the matter was never even raised. Either possibility, continuing as an independent production or working out some deal with Spielberg would have been better than the eventual experience under Warner Bros.
Williams himself was likely the biggest hindrance to the release of The Thief and the Cobbler. Whether through perfectionism in the animation inflating both time and budget; or a failure to attract investment to the project; or an abrasive personality that could have put off potential partners or financiers. The film might have been butchered as soon as it was taken away from him, but this was just one possible outcome. If production had been taken over from any of the pre-Roger Rabbit efforts the film might have seen a release far quicker and far closer to the original intent. The script was always a secondary or tertiary concern, and this continued after production was taken over by CBC; the influence of a Gary Kurtz or a Jake Eberts or a Steven Spielberg might have helped in this regard. However, as soon as it goes into production it ceases to be Williams’ magnum opus, a fact he might have been fully aware of even as he signed on with Warner Bros. Any number of contemporary figures could have got The Thief and the Cobbler over the finish line, but working with them was never a priority for Williams.
Then there’s the idea that the film’s original artistic intent, to retain some of the artistry that went into animated features during the Golden Age of Animation, was no longer an issue by the mid-1980s. The competition between Bluth and Disney leading to the Disney Renaissance brought about a level of artistry that was at least comparable to that prior era. There is something almost tragic in a film that began at a time when Hanna-Barbera style limited animation would have been the comparison eventually being released against the likes of The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1992), and Aladdin. It might have been delayed later into the 1990s as Williams’ said, but the notion of a film featuring animation from the designer of Betty Boop (Grim Natwick) going up against something groundbreaking like Toy Story (1995) has the feel of a cavalry charge against a tank.
Whenever The Thief and the Cobbler might have been released was maybe already too late, and the legend dies as soon as it is. Being released was perhaps always the worst thing that could have happened to it. Having butchered versions released at least keeps the legend alive.
With unmade films of this fame there always comes a point where the story of its making is more interesting than the film itself could ever have been. For Thief, that point maybe came sometime in the 1980s, by which point it had been in production so long that trends in animation were already leaving it behind. It’s best fate perhaps would have been to sit unreleased until it could be released as a historical curiosity, a relic of a time when feature animation was on a downturn and the arcane arts had to be preserved.
Instead, the legend became one of hundreds where studio interference robs audiences of what would have otherwise been a great, paradigm shifting film. The legend had become fact, so the legend was printed.
Ryan Fleming is the author of SLP's Reid in Braid and various short stories for the anthologies, as well as editing The Scottish Anthology.
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