Nova, wandering by herself, comes across the wreckage of the spacecraft containing Brent, who sees she is wearing Taylor’s dog tags and hopes she can lead Brent to him. Production began in February 1969, and the continually revised script opened with Taylor and Nova in the Forbidden Zone as they approach the ruins of New York and fall prey to hallucinations caused by the yet unseen mutants, with Taylor eventually vanishing. That was quite different from Dehn’s original, more optimistic ending, in which Taylor, Nova, Brent and the chimpanzees survive the war and we flash forward 50 years later, when both species are living together in peace (a test makeup for a half-human/half-ape child was even developed, but dropped due to the bestiality aspect). As war between the apes and mutants reaches its peak, a disgusted, mortally wounded Taylor would hit the button on the mutants’ bomb - rechristened the Alpha-Omega bomb and capable of destroying the entire planet - and blow everyone and everything, including the series, to hell.
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Zanuck wanted to end the franchise with Beneath, so Heston came up with an idea: Taylor would not die at the beginning of the movie but disappear, only to resurface at the end as a prisoner of the mutants.
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When he passed, it went to TV actor James Franciscus, who eventually did his own rewrite of the script to beef up Brent’s rather thin character. The role of that second spaceman, Brent, was originally offered to Burt Reynolds. A desperate Zanuck struck a deal with the actor in which it was agreed he would only appear in the movie’s opening scenes before being killed off, with the rest of the action centering on a second astronaut who had followed the trajectory of Taylor’s ship in an effort to find him. But the picture was nearly dealt a death blow when Charlton Heston refused to reprise the role of Taylor. Schaffner, committed to making Patton, Don Medford was hired to take on what was eventually retitled Beneath the Planet of the Apes. With the first film’s director, Franklin J. Dehn’s first draft, Planet of the Apes Revisited, featured many ideas that made their way into the final film, such as the mutant society worshipping an atomic bomb and a fascist gorilla leader pushing to expand the ape civilization into the Forbidden Zone. Dehn suggested having Taylor and Nova explore the ruins of New York, which were presumably buried near the Statue of Liberty, while Abrahams came up with the idea of telepathic, mutated human beings living in those ruins and protecting themselves with their mental abilities. It was at that point that Abrahams met screenwriter Paul Dehn, best known at the time for writing the definitive James Bond picture, Goldfinger (1964). A third script, strangely titled The Dark Side of the Earth, seemed to combine elements of both Boulle and Serling’s ideas but went nowhere. His idea, titled Planet of the Men, had Taylor and his son, Sirius, re-educate the primitive humans of Earth and lead them in a victorious uprising against the apes, which would for some reason cause the simians to regress back to savagery. Next up was Pierre Boulle, the French author of the novel on which the first film had been based, but who had never written a screenplay before. But most of his ideas - which primarily involved Taylor finding old technology that he uses to wage war on the ape society, or having Taylor and Nova board a spaceship and travel even further into the future - were rejected.
The obvious question was: what lay along the coastline beyond that Statue? The first writer tasked with answering that riddle was Rod Serling, who had co-written the original movie’s script and come up with its classic twist ending. Planet of the Apes ended with Charlton Heston’s George Taylor on his knees at the water’s edge in front of a half-buried Statue of Liberty, having realized that he had been back on Earth all along. Then came the hard part: where would chapter two take the story? So the decision was made to produce a second movie. But Planet of the Apes had clearly struck a nerve with audiences, and the open-ended nature of the movie’s ending offered the possibility of more material to explore.
At some point the idea came up: why not make a sequel? As we’ve stated elsewhere, sequels at the time were not the big business they are today. Jacobs, associate producer Mort Abrahams and Fox production exec Stan Hough.
With the original 1968 Planet of the Apesa huge smash at the box office - it arguably saved 20 th Century Fox from going bankrupt - a meeting took place that included studio head Richard D. “In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.”
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