The Steel Prince

Originally written to be Mad Max 3. That's quite a claim but it's true. Growing up in Australia I never had any interest in Australian films, so I didn't see the Mad Max films at first. When I did see Mad Max 2 I was blown away and immediately wrote a synopsis for Mad Max 3 called “The Steel Prince”. Then I read a story about producer Byron Kennedy in which he mentioned all the reasons why he and George Miller made an Aussie movie that was essentially NOT an Aussie movie. After that I knew I had to get my synopsis to Byron Kennedy, so I wrote him a letter introducing myself and my synopsis and telling him how awesome I thought Mad Max 2 was and how I wanted to join his production company and be a writer. I sent it to Kennedy/Miller Productions in Sydney and a week or so later Byron Kennedy called me at home. I thought it was a friend playing a trick but when I heard the voice I knew it was Byron Kennedy on the line! He told me he was intrigued by my synopsis and wanted me to flesh it out into a sixty page treatment. I had no idea what a treatment was so I read some books my parents had given me on screenwriting and discovered that a treatment was a story written in present tense that basically laid out the plot structure and beats of an idea in a form similar to a book. That was a relief, it was just writing, and I knew I could do that. So I pounded out a treatment on my typewriter (that's how far back this all happened). I don't remember if I got sixty pages but it was pretty long. I don't even remember where all the ideas came from – they just sort of started flowing when I started typing. Never mind that it was mostly crap, there was some pretty awesome stuff in “Mad Max 3: The Steel Prince” by Robert Shaw. I sent it off and got a call several months later from Byron's secretary telling me he'd read my treatment and liked it and would be in touch when he got back from a trip he was on. Tragically, Byron Kennedy was killed in a helicopter crash. I was devastated. I mean, never mind the fact that poor old Byron had been killed – that really was tragic – but I also thought well what about my story treatment? (Selfish right? I know. I was young and I apologize for it). I called Kennedy/Miller Productions and asked what was going to happen to my treatment. The girl I spoke to didn't know what I was talking about and of course I couldn't get in touch with Byron's secretary – the one who'd called to say he'd received my treatment – I didn't remember her name and when I asked to speak to her they told me she wasn't there any more. So that was that. I refused to see Mad Max 3 when it came out but all my friends swore there were scenes from my treatment in it - I had Max captured and forced to fight in a pit against a huge half-man/half-machine opponent clad in metal and a mask. The pit was surrounded by cheering/jeering enemy members of the c& Thunder Dome had the fights in the Thunder Dome cage. I had Max discover a tribe of friendly people and kids in a sort of hidden oasis base; Thunder Dome had the kids in the desert oasis. In my story they just weren't airline crash survivors. Anyway, poor old Byron was gone so who knows if it was coincidence or plagiarism with the other guys? It was decades ago and I could never prove any of it. I decided to write a script from my treatment and take out all the Mad Max references. I ended up with a script called The Steel Prince, which was a sort of Sword & Sorcery/ground based Star Wars hybrid that I thought (at the time) really rocked. The Max character became Fallon but the villains pretty much stayed the same. There's a new Mad Max movie being shot in Africa right now so I've done a quick novelization of my Steel Prince story and put on Amazon before that movie comes out. Their plot is super secret so if there are any similarities to my story I can say I did it first! See original letter and coverage received from the Australian Film Commission in 1983, and original sketch of Sordak