Halloween 6 -The Lost Halloween

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HALLOWEEN 6, directed by Scott Spiegel and executive produced by Quentin Tarantino: a dream team project that came very close to happening. That was the Halloween 6 that nearly was had it's roots in the wake of the poorly received Halloween 5, when executive producer Moustapaha Akkad, who at the time was planning an immediate follow-up, happened to read the spec scripts True Romance and Natural Born Killers by the then unknown Tarantino. "They wanted me to write Halloween 6 back when they were first going to make it," recalls the Oscar-winning filmmaker. "It totally would have dealt with that whole open-end thing that Halloween 5 had. But it just never happened.

Flash forward to March 1994: Miramax has purchased the distribution rights to the Halloween franchise for its newly established genre arm, Dimension Films. Tarantino and Spiegel are talking about working on a project for Dimension, although at this point, it is not a Halloween they have in mind. Richard Gladstein, who had worked with Spiegal on the ill-fated The Nutt House (formerly The Nutty Nut), has a conversation with Tarantino and his partner Lawrence Bender, and the subject of a Halloween 6 directed by Spiegel and executive-produced by Tarantino comes up.

"When Miramax got Halloween 6 - actually, they were calling it Halloween 666 at the time - they asked me and my partner, Lawrence Bender, who we thought would be a good director for it," Tarantino recalls. "So we just immediately both said Scotty, because the first film that Lawrence, who had produced Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, ever produced was Intruder. It was Scotty and his first movie, and I met Lawrence through him, so we both just said, 'He's perfect.' And then [Miramax executive] Bob Weinstein met him, and we talked, and he screened Intruder - the uncut version, the only one to watch."

"Richard called me up," says Spiegel, picking up his side of the odyssey. "I said, 'Yeah, that sounds really cool.' Then I had to pass the Bob Weinstein test. We had a meeting. They saw Intruder, and Weinstein said, 'Yeah, he seems like the guy for the job.' But then I had to pass the Moustapha Akkad test."

While Spiegel (who also scripted Evil Dead II) was cramming for the Akkad exam, both he and Tarantino were throwing around story ideas suitable for the a sixth Halloween. Nothing specific is forthcoming from either filmmaker on plot particulars of their proposed stories, but Tarantino does reveal some indications of where he would have taken the series. "I think it should have been closer [in tone] to the first one," he asserts. "I like the fourth one too; I thought they did a good job with it. But I would have liked to see it go back to pretty much the way it was in the original, where it was clever and suspenseful and just scary as hell."

Spiegel had his meeting with Akkad in April '94. "He was pretty cool," remembers Spiegel of that meeting. "He had some reservations about me, but finally he said, "OK, maybe we'll use you to do a polish on a script that we're considering, and then maybe we'll let you direct it."

The director finally got a chance to read the Halloween 6 draft by Scott (Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead) Rosenberg that Akkad was considering. It was a script, that Spiegel later found out, that Akkad had literally thrown across the room after reading it. "When I read the screenplay, I said, 'Oh, Boy,'" he sighs. "It reminded me of a Friday The 13th movie and presented Michael Myers as a homeless person. It was really unfocused and corny, and I just didn't understand what this homeless element was all about."

Toward the end of April, Spiegel once again met with Weinstein, and the news was not good. "He said, 'Look, we're having trouble with Moustapha," Spiegel recalls. "He's not happy with the script, and he doesn't see you as the director.' So, by the end of April, I was out of the picture. I didn't know if Quentin was still involved at that point, and I couldn't tell you for sure why he dropped out."

Spiegel admits that, while it would have certainly been fun to do a Halloween film with Tarantino, it was something of a blessing when Akkad gave him the thumbs-down. "I really was relieved," he admits. "The script that we were going to shoot at the time was going to be hard to overcome. And my feeling was that I didn't need to be the one to make a crummy sequel to what had been a decent series of films."