Arts & Entertainment/Film
Play It Again -- Proposed Sequels
to Five Entertainment Classics
March 2002
Will
entertainment-industry producers continue playing it
safe by tapping previous successes to ensure a hefty bottom line?
Though last year's remakes and sequels were mostly
disappointments, the overall fear of new ideas in
producer suites again will have a young writer's fancy turning to rehashing the
safe and familiar into big bucks. And it’s not just American productions that entertainment moguls
will be regurgitating. The “just-one-more-time” epidemic shows signs of spreading to European cinema.
Based on HFH's exclusive sources, a representative sample of what may be coming down the pipe
follows. For various reasons, none of these big-budget, special effects-laden projects
have yet been officially scheduled for release in the U.S. (Compiled by HFH’s
Hollywood, New York, Stockholm and Paris Bureaus.)
Cats II
[original: Cats]
Background: As everyone knows, Cats was the greatest
single tourist-oriented production to grace Broadway. Who would have guessed
that some minor poetry by T.S. Elliot, would spawn a musical to haunt the Great
White Way as long as it did. This new staging of the longest-running Broadway
spectacle promises to reveal some feline behavior that did not quite make the
cut for the original.
Story arc: New crowd pleaser dance/song numbers include the
memorable "Hackin' up that Hairball," the ever jaunty, "Just
Marking My Territory" and the playful "I Ate the Baby Bunny".
My Drive-Through Dinner with
Andre
(working title: Leftovers)
[original: My Dinner With Andre; 1981]
Background: The somewhat obscure original by French
filmmaker Louis Malle gained its
fame as a single two-hour dinner conversation between Wallace Shawn and
"Andre" (Andre Gregory), a flamboyant radical malcontent who carries virtually
all of the dialogue . This sequel is described by the producer as a "more
tightly edited work that essentially corrects the primary difficulty faced by
the moviegoer in the original."
Story arc: Rather than an effete "Frenchish" restaurant,
this film is set at the drive-through line of a Burger King. The action begins
with Andre dragging out his order by drifting into descriptions of avante-garde
sauce experiments even as he agonizes over the precise condiments he wants on
his Whopper. In this version, Andre never finds a dining partner and we see only
a quick cameo of Wallace Shawn contentedly munching away at a Pizza Hut across
town. Rather, Andre sits alone in his car in the parking lot as he
mutters a few pointless observations to himself .He savors the fries which he
has "super-sized" (and congratulates himself for doing so).
Concentrating on ingesting his meal, Andre becomes uncharacteristically succinct
and the movie is over 11 minutes later.
The
Nutty Messiah
(working title: Holy Moses!)*
[original: The Ten Commandments; 1956]
Background: When the studio couldn't lure Charlton Heston
away from the duties he assumed as figurehead president of the NRA to make this
sequel to Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, they did the next best thing -- Slightly
adjusting and modernizing the script, they cast a graying Jerry Lewis as Moses'
second cousin Maury who, unbeknownst to the Old Testament prophet, leads a
nomadic gang of nut heads back to the Mount.
Story arc: Maury (Jerry Lewis) and his zany zealots discover that
Moses returned from the Mount a bit too early, leaving behind five additional
tablets prepared by a micro-managing Jehovah, whose mood would have probably
been better if Maury hadn't tired to stomp out the fire in the burning bush.
Carved in fine print, the extra tabs are packed with amendments, subtitles and
regulatory dictums covering everything from tipping service personnel to avoiding frostbite to safe
toenail-clipping guidelines.
The plot takes an ironic twist when one tablet, dedicated to explaining all the secrets of home repairs, is unfortunately destroyed when Maury slips on a
bagel, leaving the Hebrew nation only with some vague instructions etched in
tablet four on "how to call for estimates."
Critic's
note: When Lewis signed on, the working title was switched to Take
Five Tablets and Call Me in the Morning after the producers had flirted with
the ungainly, Hey! Hello Nice Lady. Whoaaa -- There's More Commandments Here!
The Nutty Messiah title was an uneasy compromise that tapped into Lewis' star power
while attempting to maintain the piety of the subject matter. Though never released in the
U.S., the dubbed version of this sequel was released in France in late 1999 and
is still playing to sellout audiences as 'a Gout de Noix. Messie - Whoaaaeux!
The
Goodbye Girl II
(working title: So Leave Already!)
[original: The Goodbye Girl; 1977]
Background: The sequel's story arc draws on exhaustive interviews of focus
groups made up of patrons who had viewed Herbert Ross' original film and attempts to
satisfy their stated
preferences.
Story arc: Both Richard Dreyfuss and Marsha Mason return to
their original roles, but in the first scene they are ushered out
and thrown into a snow bank by the doorman of the hotel, after which they are
tied to the back of a bus and dragged off into the sunset.
The remaining hour and 15 minutes are filled by live-action footage of a
family of fun-loving otters scooting and sliding along a riverbank to some
foot-stompin' banjo music.
The
Eighth Seal (T8S)
[original: The Seventh Seal; 1957]
Background: Made
in 1959 by little-known director Lars Looergenskjannsoen, The Eighth
Seal was not authorized by Swedish film-giant Ingmar Bergman and ran into legal
problems when the master filmmaker sued. Bergman won a court injunction to
prevent the film's release, then a lawsuit, which called for the complete recall
and destruction of all copies of the film. Yet critics who had seen screenings
considered this version better than the original. Perhaps Bergman agreed: One
close friend disclosed that the cinematic master exclaimed in a moment of
uncharacteristic drunken candor: "To come so close -- but fall so short
of the mark. It strikes like a dagger in my heart to know: ‘one more
stinking seal and the whole damn thing congeals into – perfection.
I stand in awe…I am diminished."
Fortunately, a copy survived and, if the legalities can be resolved, it
will be dubbed and digitally re-mastered for global release as an action movie
under the title T8S.
Story arc: In this version, Death, in a more whimsical
mood, challenges the young knight to a game of Popomatic Trouble. The game
goes on interminably with one and then the other about to win, only to be sent
back to the beginning by those annoying Popomatic rules. Finally Death,
worn out and bored to tears, begs the knight to switch to Yahtzee. While Death
searches in his dark toy closet for the fifth Yahtzee die, the knight
escapes.
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