While Alan Moore’s current disdain for Hollywood’s treatment of his comics is well-documented, Daniel Manu at Television Without Pity points out that hasn’t always been the case. Manu goes all the way back to an interview in the now-defunct Comics Interview magazine from 1987; here’s an excerpt:

Alan: I have got as much confidence as it is possible to have in the people who are handling the Watchmen film. Sam Hamm is an excellent screenwriter, he’s been signed to write the Watchmen film. I think that it’s got, therefore, as good a chance as any of being a good film [snip]

Darrel: I hadn’t known there was a film in the works.

Alan: Yeah, 20th Century Fox have optioned Watchmen as a film. The producers are Joel Silver and Larry Gordon, who were the producers of 48 Hours. [snip] I’ve spoken to Joel Silver, he seems very enthusiastic and has a good track record of getting films actually made. That said, of course, we’ve been hearing about Silver Surfer and X-Men films for the past 200 years to my certain knowledge. (Laughter.) Whether the film is actually made or not is completely in the air, and how it turns out is beyond my control. But, you know, they’ve got Sam Hamm as writer of it, who is a very good, promising, new screenwriter, and has also got a good background and interest in comics and is the screenwriter, I believe, upon [sic] the new Batman film, as well. [snip] I’ve spoken to Sam, I went out to lunch with him — he came to Northampton and had lunch with me — and I’ve got complete faith in him. I believe that he will try his best to make the film as faithful to the experience of reading Watchmen as he can. I believe he’s got a lot of respect for the material, and that’s all that I can ask for, really, and I’m prepared to sort of stand by what he does.

“What did Moore’s sincerely expressed faith in Hamm get him?” Manu asks. “A screenplay that systematically removed all of the poetry, complexity and beauty of the graphic novel and replaced it with a dumbed-down plot, execrable ’80s action-movie dialogue and a radically different ending that makes little logical sense and negates the dreadful power of the original.”

That script — which ends with Dr. Manhattan saving himself from the radiation blast that created him, thereby changing history and the story into something stupid — is available on the internet.

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