Somewhat predictably, the vertiginous, otherworldly qualities of The Companions proved too great a challenge for Hollywood. In its deliberate embrace of narrative ambiguity, Montana’s screenplay displays the sort of markedly literary sensibility that the film industry has tended to view with unease. One director, recalling Montana’s script, described it simply as “unfilmable”:
"The problem was, the whole thing’s just got too much going on. I mean, you’ve got all these great plot elements—there’s this big corporate conspiracy, there’s spy stuff and car chases and even a shootout—but you also have a lot of very weird things happening, seduction by aliens or people from another dimension or whatever. At the end the whole city gets maybe destroyed or something, but then you get this final scene where it’s like, huh? Did anything even happen? […] Don’t get me wrong, I loved the script—I remember it gave me some very freaky dreams—but there’s no good way to tackle that. You either have to dumb it way down, in which case, why even bother. Or you wind up with something that most studios won’t touch because they can’t slot it into anything. I mean what sort of story is it? How would you market something like this?’"
Montana was only 26 when she wrote The Companions. She had dropped out of the graduate program at the San Francisco Art Institute a few years earlier, and was paying the bills through a mix of bartending and freelance writing gigs while working her way through several drafts of her script, which she described to a friend as an “ambivalent love letter” to San Francisco and its history. In the fall of 1982, Montana passed a copy of the script to Steven Trevino, a former boyfriend who had recently moved to Los Angeles and started working in the film industry. Trevino, a slick operator who made connections easily, was able to get the script picked up by a producer at Paramount. Almost immediately however, trouble started. Disagreements between Montana, Trevino, and the executives at Paramount over script changes led to a complicated legal dispute over rights that dragged on for months. Eventually, the studio sold off the script to Disney, where it languished for two years before being picked up by Francis Ford Coppola’s production company.
Over the course of the next decade, The Companions floated through Los Angeles like a dream one can’t quite dispel. At various points, all sorts of big names were rumored to have been attached to it—actors as varied as Madonna, Isabelle Adjani, and Rae Dawn Chong were all considered for the role of Sydney—but production always failed to go forward for one reason or another. The Companions lingered for years in limbo, passed between studios and producers until it eventually faded into oblivion. Embittered by the experience, Montana gave up on Hollywood and moved back east, where she pursued a moderately successful career as a visual artist. She never wrote anything else of note. Eventually, she returned to her hometown in Massachusetts, where she died in a car accident in 2004.
Interviews conducted with veterans of the film industry provide a range of explanations for why The Companions never made it to the screen. Screenwriter Zak Penn, who has written or consulted on dozens of scripts over the past three decades, sees the troubled history of Montana’s script as a story about the industry’s longstanding inability to embrace difficult projects:
"It’s not surprising to me that The Companions was never able to get made. In some ways it reads like a classic conspiracy/sci-fi thriller—Parallax View meets William S. Gibson—but the plot spins out so wildly from there it’s impossible to get a grip on what’s going on or what it all means. That kind of story will always be a tough sell in the American film industry—even established directors like Cronenberg and David Lynch still have problems getting their films produced here. People need to fit things into neat boxes and there wasn’t any box The Companions seemed to fit into."
For some, the issue lies with Hollywood’s well-known reluctance to commit its extensive resources to a project that didn’t fit into conventional expectations.