1982's Conan the Barbarian was a smash, putting Arnold Schwarzenegger on the map and triggering a brief renaissance for sword and sorcery films. Directed by John Milius, Conan the Barbarian is taut and polished, and much of the load is carried by Schwarzenegger's implacable energy and charm. However, screenwriter Oliver Stone penned a wild first draft that would have drastically changed the film.

Conan's big-screen introduction began gestating in the mid-1970s but hit its stride in 1978, when Paramount Pictures expressed interest. With the studio wanting a recognizable screenwriter to pull in investors, Milius turned to Oliver Stone, who was in heavy demand after writing Midnight Express, for which he would win an Academy Award the following year. Stone took four months to turn out his first draft for Conan, and the result is a four-hour acid trip of mutants rampaging a post-apocalyptic version of the world at the behest of dark gods.

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Thulsa Doom on his throne in Conan the Barbarian

The script begins in a familiar fashion, with Conan as a child, witnessing a raid on his village and the slaying of his family. But the story then takes some big swerves. In Stone's draft, Thulsa Doom is a side character, despite being described as the greatest threat; a sorcerer-general who relies on his unholy conduit to Set. The central villain for much of the film is Taramis. Believed to have perished long ago, she returns after the death of King Prospero to wrench the kingdom away from her twin sister, the newly crowned Queen Yasmine.

Conan is in town for a good brawl and some high-stakes robbery, but the situation escalates when Yasmine hires him as a bodyguard. The job doesn't last. Taramis is taking control, and she's not only thrown open the gates to legions of mutants, but to Thulsa Doom himself. Conan drifts in and out of this version of the script, joining a mercenary crew and falling in love with their leader, Valeria. After what seems like countless setbacks, Conan picks a side and leads the mercenaries and what remains of Yasmina's army forward to reclaim her kingdom.

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A full breakdown of the wildness of this script would take thousands of words. It's definitely not the Conan fans know today. Stone's idea of Conan is verbose and openly lecherous, and some of the scenes he describes are oddly Catholic. He places a fragment of Dante's Inferno in the script to enhance his description of the robbery of the Stygian Tower, one of the few scenes that partially survived to the final film. It was a deliberate decision on Stone's part to have Conan as the lone pagan against the forces of hell.

Conan, crucified on the Tree of Woe, in Conan the Barbarian

Not much else lingers from his script, but the two pieces that do are striking. Conan's ferocious invocation to Crom is recognizable in a prayer before battle. Conan's crucifixion by Thulsa Doom is also here, though its circumstances are quite different. Stone can't take all the credit for this sequence, though. He borrowed heavily from two stories by Robert E. Howard, Black Colossus and A Witch Shall Be Born. Conan's plight is from the latter, a story critics and scholars feel is only remarkable for this sequence.

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If there's one loss from the original draft, which Stone hoped would set off a James Bond-style franchise, it's an amazing sequence near the end where Conan decapitates Thulsa Doom. The demon god Set, Lovecraftian in its tentacled splendor, rises from the depths of the earth to claim the sorcerer's head. But Stone's biggest scenes, like this one, threatened to balloon the cost of production beyond what was possible. Stone envisioned battles with thousands of mutants, all requiring intricate effects work. Between the draft's length and its ruined future setting, John Milius quickly set it aside.

Conan the Barbarian is more than an iconic film. It's the moment Schwarzenegger became a star, his truculent but never foolish barbarian a legend made flesh. Oliver Stone's original draft is an incredible footnote worth studying, even though only traces of it remain in the final film. Though Stone seems to look back on this leaner version of Conan with the bitterness of a man who had bigger plans yet to come for the mercenary king, it's hard to imagine Conan as anyone else than what John Milius and Arnold Schwarzenegger forged in steel.

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