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Post by Nalkarj on Jan 31, 2022 22:14:47 GMT
Betty Comden and Adolph Green (if you don’t know—the duo who wrote On the Town, Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon…) once wrote an original screenplay—ultimately, quelle tragédie, unproduced—for a Cole Porter jukebox musical about a screenwriting duo who are trying to write a Cole Porter jukebox musical. This is amazing. Can some studio please buy the rights to this script and finally make the movie?
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Post by Nalkarj on Feb 16, 2022 19:58:06 GMT
I might have mentioned this before, but I think a TV adaptation of William L. DeAndrea’s mystery series about TV exec and amateur sleuth Matt Cobb would work well. The books are cheerful, visual, and jet-setting, and their mystery plots are puzzling without being overly complex, which is the best situation for TV mysteries, I think. (That is to say: The mysteries are tougher to solve than your average Murder, She Wrote episode, but not as much as a John Dickson Carr or Ellery Queen book.) Also, they’re about a rich, charming hero who travels the world, romances beautiful women, and solves mysteries. Out of escapist fiction, who could ask for anything more?
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Post by Nalkarj on Feb 25, 2022 15:20:33 GMT
One book that I’m always surprised hasn’t been adapted for either a miniseries or a movie is Ira Levin’s Son of Rosemary (1997), the sequel to Rosemary’s Baby.
Plot: The Castevet coven bewitched Rosemary into a coma after baby Andy’s birth, but she wakes up when Andy turns 33. He says he’s fought the coven’s influence and isn’t trying to end the world. Rosemary isn’t so sure.
It’s not a great or even good book—Levin’s writing in his early books is pretty darn good, but here he’s clearly writing for a quick paycheck—but it’s better than a written-for-a-paycheck sequel to Rosemary’s Baby deserves to be. A director and screenwriter could certainly expand on some of the ideas and images. And Rosemary’s Baby is still a known property, so a producer would probably think it’ll make money. And, though I haven’t seen the made-for-TV sequel Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby, Son of Rosemary is probably better than that.
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Post by Nalkarj on May 9, 2022 3:47:56 GMT
The Stephen Sondheim musical I always think would make for a great movie is his and bookwriter John Weidman’s much-reworked Road Show, which in previous iterations was also called Wise Guys and Bounce. It’s about the now-almost-totally-forgotten Addison and Wilson Mizner, brothers, conmen, and 1920s bons vivants. I find them both fascinating—Addison was the architect who built Boca Raton; Wilson co-owned the Brown Derby, cowrote a bunch of movies (including a favorite of mine, 1932’s One Way Passage), and came up with quips we’re still quoting today (“Be kind to everyone on the way up; you’ll meet the same people on the way down”)—and so did Sondheim and Weidman, judging from Sondheim’s book Look, I Made a Hat and just how many times they rewrote this story. A movie adaptation of Road Show would be a hard sell to a studio—a musical, in the ’20s, about two guys no one’s ever heard of?—and the way I’d like to do it would be even harder: While the last version, Road Show, is good, I have a fondness for the Bing Crosby and Bob Hope-inspired elements Sondheim and Weidman put into earlier drafts, and I think it works well in the story even if Sondheim and Weidman eventually didn’t. So my preferred version would be based on incorporating the Bing and Bob stuff into Road Show. Which probably wouldn’t make the studio, Sondheim’s estate, or Weidman happy. But, man, I think it’d work great as a movie.
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Post by Nalkarj on Jun 21, 2022 15:46:09 GMT
The thread on Frenzy reminded me that I’d love to adapt Philip MacDonald’s X v. Rex (1933) as a Hitchockian thriller. I even have a title I like: Kaleidoscope, after one of the chapters. (An unproduced Hitchcock project called Kaleidoscope eventually became Frenzy.) The plot is about a serial killer who targets policemen, sparking fear throughout Britain. The police wrongly suspect a gentleman burglar—who naturally ends up falling in love with the commissioner’s daughter. Perfect material for Hitchcock—and MacDonald worked on Rebecca and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
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