The Shadow (1994 Film) - Production

Production

Producer Martin Bregman bought the rights to The Shadow in 1982. Screenwriter David Koepp had listened to The Shadow radio show as a child when CBS radio re-ran it on Sunday nights. He was hired in 1990 to write a new draft and was able to find the right tone that the studio liked. Bregman remembers, “Some of them were light, some of them were darker, and others were supposedly funnier – which they weren’t. It just didn’t work”. Koepp's script relied predominantly on the pulp novels while taking the overall tone from the radio show with the actual plot originated by Koepp himself in consultation with Bregman. In an attempt to differentiate the film from other superhero films of the time, Koepp focused on “the copy line, ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?’ and wondered how he knew what evil lurks in the hearts of men. And I decided that perhaps it was because he was uncomfortably familiar with the evil in his own heart”. For Koepp, the film then became “a story of guilt and atonement”. He picked Shiwan Khan as the film’s villain because “he was bold and he knew what he was doing – he wanted to conquer the world. That was very simple, maybe a little ambitious, but he knew exactly what he wanted.” He had always been a fan of Alec Baldwin and wrote the script with him in mind: "He has the eyes and the voice; he had so much of what I pictured Cranston being". Koepp also sat in on rehearsals and incorporated a lot of the actor’s humor into the script.

The film was shot on the Universal backlot in Hollywood on five soundstages over 60 days with a five day mini-unit tour of location shooting, and a week lost when an earthquake destroyed the Hall of Mirrors set. Mulcahy said, “There are a lot of FX in this film, but it’s not a FX film. It’s a character/story-driven film. The FX are part of the story.”