Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm golf clap out of sheer politeness and misguided empathy to the director/co-screenwriter duo and winners of this year's coveted Cinematic Stupidity Lifetime Acheivement Award, Michael Sucsy and Patricia Rozema.
They, along with HBO Films, have just wrapped up production on the remake (due in April 2009) of Grey Gardens. Grey. Gardens. The documentary. About Edith and "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale living in a filthy, unkempt mansion in the Hamptons? They remade a fucking documentary.
American film remakes couldn't be more Catch 21. Boy, Alfie sure wasn't a lock. No one could have seen an updated Italian Job coming. Directors, screenwriters and executive producers will latch onto and jump through any hoop to bring to fruition any damn plot structure or character outline from an original classic film if it means they won't have to force the right sides of their brains to run laps around the school.
I could punch up the coming attractions page at IMDB or Upcoming Films, find sixty remakes planned for 2009 and not even flinch. No more surprises here. That fridge has been raided so often even the catsup packets are gone. But a documentary? Making up Drew Barrymore to look 56 years old? Kill me now.
But seriously, wasn't this supposed to be based on the musical (based on the documentary)? I see that Wikipedia says it's based on the documentary as well, but certainly...the musical grabbed a buttload of Tony noms, and just like the movie-to-musical-to-movie/musical path of The Producers and Hairspray and some others I don't feel like trying to recall, this seems like a no-brainer (for those Hollywood-types with no brains).
Staunch. That's my final word on the subject.
Posted by: telutci | November 23, 2008 at 01:57 PM
WTF is this world going to?????????
Posted by: Elias | November 23, 2008 at 02:01 PM
Yay! Now we can do Titicut Follies with Justin Timberlake and John Krasinski
Posted by: Lex10 | November 23, 2008 at 02:10 PM
Ye goddess... we've come a long way from the promise of I've Heard the Mermaids Singing.
Posted by: Philip David Morgan | November 23, 2008 at 02:38 PM
Have you never heard of a docudrama?
Posted by: Albert and David Measles | November 23, 2008 at 03:35 PM
this ruined my whole minute
Posted by: bartleby | November 23, 2008 at 05:58 PM
Less a docudrama, more a melomentary.
Posted by: K | November 23, 2008 at 08:08 PM
Hey, what about the An American Family remake with Clay Aiken as the outed gay son, Lance Loud? Fahrenheit 9/11 with Will Ferrell? Let's not rush to judgment.
Posted by: Clayton | November 23, 2008 at 09:22 PM
...after this, I fully expect some putz to make a "docudrama" out of THE ETERNAL JEW. Don't laugh, some asshole is probably lining up the financing as we post...
Posted by: King Daevid MacKenzie | November 24, 2008 at 12:54 AM
"Less a docudrama, more a melomentary."
This is my new favorite quote. I will use it excessively and at inappropriate moments for at least a week.
Posted by: Derek in DC | November 24, 2008 at 01:27 AM
A documentary in the same sense that The Office is a documentary- hybrid of reality style and conventional narrative. K is quite right.
Posted by: Dale | November 24, 2008 at 10:54 AM
They're actually doing a feature film based on the larger than life documentary The King Of Kong… *sigh*
Posted by: Bee | November 25, 2008 at 03:19 AM
Don't rush to judgment. As it happens, I read the script, and it was damn good. It's not just a remake of the documentary -- it's a much bigger story about the Beales that includes their days as society darlings, the making of the documentary, and what happened to them after the documentary was released. I'm genuinely looking forward to it.
Posted by: Jack | November 29, 2008 at 12:11 AM