Hollywood Babble On & On #1262: Quo Vadis American Crime Story?

Glad to back my loyal readers. I hope you're still out there.

*crickets*

Sorry it's been soooooo long since I last posted. Things have been busy lately. One the up side, I signed a contract with a publisher in Los Angeles for a mystery novel, and my work as chief caregiver for my parents has been taking up most of my time lately since my mother's knee surgery.

Anyway, enough about me, let's talk about movies and TV.

If you've been missing American Crime Story: The People vs OJ Simpson, you've been missing a treat. It's been wildly entertaining, and stacked with tons of Emmy worthy performances from the entire cast. I haven't seen a single false note in the acting, and more than a few moments of pure performance bliss.

(The scene where David Schwimmer as Robert Kardashian lectures his kids on the emptiness of fame without virtue is pure brilliance. I had to rewind to revel in its satiric glory)

But what to do with Season 2?

Well, it seems that the show's driving force Ryan Murphy wants to take the show in a different direction in Season 2. He wants to take it from covering a true crime story with the sort of intense detail that only a TV series can do, and do a fictional story about people living in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. So basically a variation of David Simon's Tremé from HBO, which came and went with some good reviews, but not much in the line of impact.

This seems to be in keeping with Murphy's modus operandi to create a show, deliver really high quality in the first season, then begin whittling away everything people liked about the show in subsequent seasons to diminishing returns in audience satisfaction and ratings. I witnessed this with Murphy's biggest mainstream hit Glee, where my twitter feed went from fans raving about the show, to fans complaining about the show, to fans ignoring the show. The same has happened with his other anthology series American Horror Story, which got raves at the beginning and then faded into a mess of loose narrative strings and steadily declining viewership.

I don't know what happened in the case of Horror Story, but it seems that Crime Story is the victim of a fundamental misunderstanding of the show's success. The people behind the show seem to think that the show's success hinges on issues of race in America.

Like in the real case of O.J. Simpson, race is more of a distraction and an excuse for some decisions than the real heart of the issue. The success of American Crime Story is that they're telling a true story where literally everyone knows the ending so well that it's compelling to watch.

I think there's a market for more true crime, and that Murphy and ACS are fools to just give it up when they've already set themselves up as the gold standard.

Let's look at some cases they could adapt that would be better ideas:

Harry Thaw & Stanford White.  In the 1900s White was a brilliant architect, top dog of New York high society, and an unrepentant lecher. Harry Thaw was the son of nouveau riche industrialists who had the paranoid belief that White had blackballed him from high society, this obsession grew even stronger when he married model and dancer Evelyn Nesbit. Nesbit had been White's mistress when she was a teenager, and may have even been raped by White. This put the already mentally unstable and violently abusive Thaw over the edge and he murdered White in the middle of a nightclub in front of a hundred people.

The trial and its aftermath pretty much birthed the tabloid and scandal culture we have today, and is loaded with so many myths, deceptions, and half-truths it could make compelling viewing. 

Stephanie St. Clair: The Queen of Harlem. This is the story of a woman who came to control the "numbers racket" in Harlem. While Queen she held off the mobsters like the psychopathic Dutch Schultz and became a thorn in the side of corrupt and racist policemen by using her resources to promote civil rights and political reform.

And if business and activism wasn't enough trouble for her, she ended up in a disastrous marriage to a  political activist turned cult leader with messianic and hitlerian tendencies that ended with a gunshot.

The fact that she survived and thrived in these conditions would make a fascinating television show.

You could even cast Travolta as Dutch Schultz, Sterling K. Brown as her right hand Bumpy Johnson, and Courtney B. Vance as St. Clair's charismatic but erratic cult-leader husband Sufi Abdul Hamid who was dubbed the "Black Hitler" by the press.

The Murder of William Desmond Taylor. I wrote a review of the riveting book Tinseltown and I said then that it would make a great series, and I still do.

Anyway, these stories are true and I think they'd really rope in the viewers far better than just another social realist drama about how life is hard in New Orleans.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1254: Let Die Hard Die Out.

20th Century Fox has announced that they're developing a 6th Die Hard movie, but this one will be different. Franchise star Bruce Willis will only bookend an "origin story" about a rookie John McLain in 1970s New York and most of the heavy lifting, running, jumping, and shooting will be done by a younger, cheaper actor in the hope that they might get the budget within a range that'll someday make a profit.

There are a two conundrums with this idea.

1. The original Die Hard is the origin story. It's about how an average joe police detective becomes a butt-kicking terrorist killer, not because of mad ninja skills, or superpowers, but solely through ingenuity, toughness, and a refusal to ever give up.

2. There already is a prequel to Die Hard in existence, and it's this:

You see the Die Hard franchise has a complicated history. Back in the 1960s the novelist Roderick Thorp wrote the original novel The Detective and sold the movie rights to 20th Century Fox. They made a movie starring Frank Sinatra and it was a big hit. Naturally, Fox wanted a sequel, and so did Thorp, so he wrote a new novel called Nothing Lasts Forever.

But there was a complication, Frank Sinatra wasn't available to make the sequel movie when the time came. The project languished in development hell until the mid-1980s. 

Producer Joel Silver, who was on a major hot-streak at the time, wanted an action thriller property that he could do with Fox, and found Nothing Lasts Forever in their archives. They offered the part to Sinatra, who said he was too old for all the running and shooting, so they offered it to Robert Mitchum, who declined for the same reasons.

It was then they decided on a rewrite.

Retired NYPD detective Joe Leland was transformed into active-duty NYPD detective John McLain, and instead of a rescuing an estranged daughter and grandchildren, he was rescuing an estranged ex-wife. They also tweaked the novel's ambiguous ending where Joe Leland succumbs to blood loss, collapses, and possibly dies.

They cast Bruce Willis, who was also on a burgeoning hot streak from his hit TV show Moonlighting, and movie history was made spawning thousands of imitators and movie pitch shorthand  with "It's Die Hard on a---".

Sadly, Fox has decided that repeating history is a good business model. They took what was a neat, tight, trilogy that ended on a high with Die Hard With A Vengeance, and enforced the laws of diminishing returns. 

There is only one reason to keep making Die Hard movies, and that's because they can still pull in about $200+ in the foreign box-office even though domestic grosses are decidedly lacklustre.

However, there's a catch.

The post-Vengeance Die Hards cost between $90-$115 million to make, and about that amount again to distribute and market internationally. That's an overhead of about $200+ million per picture.

Domestically, the studio gets roughly 50¢ on the box-office dollar as the "rental" the rest goes to the theatre. Internationally, it depends on the individual country or territory, but averages out to about 25¢ to 30¢ on the box office dollar.

That means that at best the more recent movies broke even at most. I also don't see folks clamouring to get them on home video or on television airings. I got the first trilogy on Blu-Ray and I just try to ignore the others.

But I see where Fox is going with this plan.

They know how beloved the first Die Hard is, and how many watch it every Christmas as a sort of antidote to the more saccharine holiday fare. They also know that announcing a remake with a new star would be received with screams of "blasphemy" and a lot of bad press. That's why I suspect they start a new series with the proposed Die Hard: Year One, and hopefully segue it into a full on Die Hard remake with lots of CGI explosions as a hundred buildings are seized by ten thousand terrorists and only superhuman John McLain can stop them. They hope that audiences will be so used to this new franchise, they'll somehow accept it over the original.

Which brings me to the point of all my rambling.

What made the first Die Hard such a classic was not the quantity of the action, even though it did deliver quantity, it was the quality. Each set-piece was carefully constructed to deliver the maximum emotional impact on the audience without having to resort to size. Die Hard 2 slipped into the "just make it bigger" trap, and was the comparative low point for the original trilogy. Die Hard With A Vengeance found the right mix of size and dramatic impact, which was why that original trilogy ended on a high.

The latter two sequels, I haven't been able to sit through one to completion, seem to be just after quantity and not quality. There's no tension, no dramatic impact, no reason to give a shit.

My suggestion to Fox is to look at what made the original so beloved. The mechanics of suspense, action, and story are all out there to be carefully studied, and use that as a template to develop new original action properties that could find an audience all their own.

Of course, that would take work, and I doubt they're interested in that when they can just throw money at the problem.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1222: Comebacks, Questions & Shameless Self Promotion

Network television is in a bit of a pickle.

Every day they lose viewers to their rivals be they cable channels, or streaming services like Netflix and Amazon.  The key to the success of these upstarts is that they produce bold original programming that the once mainstream networks don't deliver.

So what do the networks do?

They bring back shows from the dead.

Fox is bringing back The X Files, complete with original stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.

Meanwhile NBC is bringing back 90s sitcom Coach with Craig T. Nelson.

Now the reaction to the return of The X Files has mostly been a big collective "Hell yeah!" A lot of people loved that show but was terribly dissatisfied with the way it fizzled out. Dying of over-extension, creative burnout, and network meddling. 

X-Fans, and they are legion, wanted the show to have a proper ending, something they didn't get from the jumbled mess of the second X Files movie. So a return would mean a lot to them, because it gives the beloved show, and its complex mythology a second chance at a proper ending.

Which brings me to Coach, and the question why?

I never watched the show myself, but I knew that it was popular, but not exactly ground-breaking or revolutionary. When I heard it was coming back I looked it up and saw that when the show ended after a very long run, they gave the characters some happy endings and wrapped it all up nice and neat.

There was no clamour for the return of Coach, no one griping online about how unsatisfied they were by the ending. So why resurrect it like The X Files?

The only explanation I can think of is the Twenty-Eight Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, or by it's more familiar name The Nelson-Bakula Amendment which was passed in 1986.

That Amendment states that actors Craig T. Nelson and Scott Bakula cannot be off television for more than six months at any given time. They're not getting any younger, and need to bank lots of episodes to rerun into infinity, because if they ever run out, then the government must nuke every state capitol.

Not sure why they passed and ratified it, seems like a silly thing to put into the Constitution, but who am I to judge?

In other news...

My short story A CHOICE OF MONSTERS is now available for Kindle users for 99¢ US.

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Not into monsters?

Maybe a crime story is more your thing.

Hollywood player Carter Bennett is losing friends fast. They're dying young, in the weirdest ways, and there's a strange old man showing up at their funerals and leaving the same cryptic message.

Bennett's investigation uncovers a brutal revenge from the darkest corner of the Cold War.

Only 99¢!

Also available in the 

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Buy them, read them, leave reviews, and tell all your friends and family to do the same.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1176: Killing Wolverine Killing Comics

Wolverine, Marvel Comics most popular character is going to die.

Not only that, Marvel says that he's going to stay dead, forever, full stop, period.

They even have a picture showing Wolverine being carted off by the Grim Reaper in the manner of Michelangelo's Pieta:

They dug up their old art-history textbook, so you know they must be serious.

Now here's what I think:

(To be sung to the tune of "MacArthur Park.")

I CALL BULLSHIT

I CALL BULLSHIT

I CALL STACKS AND STACKS OF BULLSHIT

(And scene)

Wolverine's death in the comics is meaningless. It will have zero effect on the movies, and that's what matters these days, and we all know that Marvel has no intention of letting their biggest earner moulder in an inky grave.

As soon as the publicity dies down, and the folks at Marvel realize that it won't make Fox relinquish the rights to the X-Men, they'll make a big announcement that Wolverine will be brought back to life.

Hell, DC couldn't even keep the unpopular character of Jason Todd (aka Robin 2/The Red Hood 2) dead, even though readers voted overwhelmingly to kill him off in a phone-in poll.

Do you really think Marvel is going to let Wolverine stay dead? Because if you do, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you for a song.

And the people in the industry wonder why it's so hard to get people into superhero comics while superhero movies and TV shows sell like hotcakes.

Well, let's recap some of the reasons:

1. HARD TO GET: When I was a kid we had to walk a little under half a mile to get to the convenience store that carried all kinds of comics, ranging from the Marvel/DC superheroes at 45¢ an issue, to bags of five to seven Gold Key reprints each for $1 a pop.

Today, I have to go about fifty miles to the nearest specialty retailer. I could order things online, but then you lose a lot of the ability to discover new titles and characters you get by browsing an old fashioned spinner rack.

But that's not all...

2. HARD TO GET INTO: Even if you do manage to get comics, if you are not intimately familiar with 75-80 years of continuity, including multiple retcons, you are NOT going to know what the hell is going on. Even DC's mega-retcon "The New 52" like its last mega-retcon "Crisis On Infinite Earths" isn't completely retconning everything since the artists and writers won't give up their favourite bits, and the companies don't want to lose any potential merchandising and movie money from making people wait a little while for a character to develop naturally over time instead of just dumping them fully formed in the middle of everything.

3. SEXY SELLS SKANKY DOESN'T: Hardly a month goes by without someone making a valid complaint against the often anatomically inaccurate and usually ridiculous hyper-sexualization of female characters. The most recent being putting Spider-Woman in an impossible position and changing her costume into a thin coat of paint. 

Comics need kids to read comics to keep the audience alive and growing. However, both kids and parents are repelled by comic art that is just a few millimetres of spandex from looking like full-on pornography, and story lines dwelling on the sex-lives of superheroes often add nothing new to the characters except get in the way of what is their purpose, to give people near-mythological stories of demigods and monsters battling over issues good and evil.

4. CONSTANT SHELL GAMING: Publishers love the publicity they can get by pulling of stunts like killing a major character, or switching their race or gender. They claim that these changes will be permanent, but you know they will never permanently change the mainstream continuity they have decades of stories and dedicated fandom invested in. The whole thing is to just get some attention in the mainstream press, get a 1-week uptick in sales from the curious, who will take a look inside, not understand a damn thing going on, and never buy another comic again.

It's starting to drive people, even comics fans, nuts. Which is why they're not buying comics, but instead go to the superhero movies, who, for the most part, stick with their job of telling fantastical stories of heroism & don't rely on killing off major characters for promotion.

The comics industry needs a major overhaul, not only in what it's selling, but in how the industry is run, and it should be done while there's still an industry to reform.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1150: Fall TV Preview FOX!

2014-15 Fox Schedule

(New programs in UPPER CASE & BOLD; all times ET/PT)

MONDAY

8-9 PM – GOTHAM - A show about DC's most infamous fictional city during Batman's adolescence. All I can say is that Ben MacKenzie who stars as the young detective Jim Gordon better start rocking the stache, and soon.

9-10 PM – Sleepy Hollow

TUESDAY

8-9 PM – UTOPIA - Some sort of reality show about people trying to create a utopia. Like all other utopias it will fail miserably, but provide lots of cheap melodrama for television.

9-9:30 PM – New Girl

9:30-10 PM – The Mindy Project

WEDNESDAY

8-9 PM – Hell’s Kitchen

9-10 PM – RED BAND SOCIETY - New drama about a bunch of good looking teens bonded by terminal illness. Expect them to start dropping like flies when it comes time to renegotiate their contracts.

THURSDAY

8-9 PM – Bones

9-10 PM – GRACEPOINT - An American adaptation of the British smash Broadchurch about a seaside town rocked by the murder of a young boy that promises to go in new directions from the original. It stars David Tennant, who starred in the British original which is also getting a second season. That means that he's playing the same character on two shows in two countries more or less simultaneously. That's some serious time-lord shit.

FRIDAY

8-9 PM – Masterchef Junior

9-10 PM – UTOPIA - More Utopia falling apart.

SATURDAY

7-10:30 PM – Fox Sports Saturday

SUNDAY

7-7:30 PM – NFL Game

7-8 PM – Bob’s Burgers

8-8:30 PM – The Simpsons

8:30-9 PM – Brooklyn Nine-Nine

9-9:30 PM – Family Guy

9:30-10 PM – MULANEY - A sitcom about a comedian's off stage life. It's like the 90s have returned!

MIDSEASON/WAITING IN THE WINGS

BACKSTROM - Americanization of a Swedish book series about a hard living overweight and "politically incorrect" detective named Everett Backstrom. Not sure how "politically incorrect" he will be.

EMPIRE - Drama about the music industry, because network television wants the world to know about an industry more dysfunctional than their own. Much is being made about how Lee Daniels, who made The Butler, was behind its creation, but I don't really see him giving up his movie career to become a showrunner.

HIEROGLYPH - Sexy show about sexy ancient Egyptians doing sexy things. A big sexy Feh from me.

WAYWARD PINES - A Twin Peaks rip-off tribute from M. Night Shyamalan starring Matt Dillon. Expect a really lame, heavily telegraphed twist for the ending, and that twist will be early cancellation.

THE LAST MAN ON EARTH - Will Forte is the only star as the only person left alive on Earth. Everybody else is dead and he will die alone, slowly, and in agony when a small cut turns septic. It's a sitcom.

WEIRD LONERS - A bunch of modern misanthropes are forced to socialize, hilarity ensues.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1139: Mrs. Doubtfire Returns

Fox 2000 has commissioned a writer to develop a script for Mrs. Doubtfire 2, a sequel to the 1993 comedy starring Robin Williams. 

If you don't have basic cable, where the first film has been running on a loop for the last 20 years, it's the story of an unemployed actor who lost custody of his children because of his irresponsibility, so he puts on an elaborate disguise as an old British lady to become their nanny, and G to light PG  rated hilarity ensues.

Reports say that the studio has been sniffing around the idea of a sequel since the original raked in over $200+ million domestic but struggled to come up with a decent premise since (SPOILER ALERT) the original film has a happy ending.

One can imagine what the studio is thinking to jump into a sequel 20 years later, when the star is struggling to keep a sitcom on the air. I can imagine to pitch meeting:

PRESIDENT: We need a new movie. Something original and daring! 

EXECUTIVE: If an original movie flops, you could get fired.

PRESIDENT: Good point. Have a new Mercedes. We need a new remake or a sequel. Something where I can deny making any mistakes when it flops, and blame it on the market research people. 

EXECUTIVE: (looks through list) We haven't done a Mrs. Doubtfire sequel yet.

PRESIDENT: Wasn't it a one joke premise that is all wrapped up nicely with a happy ending?

EXECUTIVE: More or less.

PRESIDENT: What will be the new movie's premise?

EXECUTIVE: We could have Robin Williams disguise himself as an actor with a viable movie career…

PRESIDENT: Hmmmm… Sounds edgy, daring, and inventive. I HATE IT! 

EXECUTIVE: We could just pay some writer to come up with a reason for him to dress up like an old lady again.

PRESIDENT: PERFECT! Give it a green light and a $100 million budget. We don't want to spend to much on it, times are tight.

EXECUTIVE: You got it boss!

In case you missed it, there are pretty good reasons why it's hard to make a sequel to a family comedy, especially 20 years later.

1. TIME: It's literally been 20 years since the last movie. It's quite believable for the Williams character to be a grandparent. So what's the premise? He has to disguise himself as an old lady to spend time with his grandchildren, who he can't normally see because his meth-head oldest child lost custody and got a restraining order against the whole family. Sounds more depressing than ever.

2. HAPPY ENDING: The first film ended with him restoring his connection with his kids, and having success as an actor. So why must his character don a disguise as an old lady? Did he lose everything, is he on the run from the mob, have his kids disowned him and forbidden him from seeing his grandkids? Either way, the happy ending that had been earned through his comical trials has hence been declared all for nothing. That created a subconscious sense in the audience that they'd been kinda cheated, and many will just stay home.

3. ONE JOKE: That's all the original had. Sure, it may have seemed original and novel at the time, but it's been done to death over the last 20 years.

I wish Hollywood wasn't ruled by greed and fear, then maybe they might be willing to try something original and novel again.

But I doubt it.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1117: Multiple Stuff...

RIP PHILLIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN

You've no doubt heard that Phillip Seymour Hoffman, one of Hollywood's best character actors has passed away, and word is coming down that it was from a drug overdose.  I don't have to explain what a great actor he was, there's a whole Wikipedia page listing his awards and nominations.

He was one of a handful of performers in Hollywood who actually looked and acted like the characters they played were real people in a real world, no matter how unreal the on-screen situation was.

That's what makes his loss so saddening.

The fact that he most likely died of a heroin overdose is what makes his loss so enraging. 

It's sickening to hear of an actor who was always so original in his work to die from a celebrity cliche.

Reports are saying that he had been clean for twenty years, but had recently relapsed, and gone into a heroin induced death spiral. Heroin is especially pernicious because it induces a chemically induced selfishness in the addict. They lose all interest in family, friends, work, and life in general, and become single-mindedly dedicated to getting more heroin.

We'll never know exactly what sparked his initial addiction or his lethal relapse. There is no scan for the state of the human soul. So I won't speculate, I will just say that I hate to see such a disaster happen yet again.

If you are using heroin: Get help.

If you are thinking of starting to use heroin: Don't.

Too many have died for an illusion.

DC COMICS MATURITY PROBLEM

A tip of my jaunty sombrero to reader and twitter follower @MediaWarrior for linking me to this video review of some of the questionable decisions being made by DC Comics. It's nice to see someone agree with me on many points, though I must admit that I deliver them differently.

ZOOEY GETS ANIMATED

Zooey Deschanel has inked a deal to produce a fairy tale themed animated comedy for the Fox Network.

I don't have an opinion on the project, I just needed a cheap excuse to post her picture to cheer me up after two stories about things that made me sad and angry.

Okay, much better.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1114: Random Drippings From My Brain Pan….

TARANTINO TO COURT?

Quentin Tarantino is filing suit against Gawker.com for "copyright infringement" over their spreading of a leaked copy of his script for The Hateful Eight. The Western script was sent out by Tarantino to a select group, someone involved with that group leaked it, Gawker made it worse, and Tarantino's saying he's shelved the project, and has called in the lawyers.

Why?

Let's break down the situation:

1. The script was reportedly an early draft, maybe even a first draft, and no doubt would have been through a lot more polishing. I can understand not wanting anyone outside of a few trusted associates to read a first draft.

2. Gawker went above and beyond the simple reporting of the story, they actively participated in the piracy by making the purloined play available to their readers.

3. The reason Gawker deliberately made an unpleasant situation worse is that their business model seems to built on acting like predictable pseudo-subversive dicks, and spreading the script seemed to be the dickiest move available.

I find it hard to sympathize with Gawker.

SPEAKING OF LAWSUITS:

The Director, Ted Kotcheff, and Writer, Robert Klane, of the 1989 cult-hit comedy Weekend At Bernie's are suing 20th Century Fox and MGM for what they say are millions of dollars in profits that were denied them.

For those who don't know, Weekend At Bernie's was a farcical comedy produced by Gladden Entertainment and released by Fox back in 1989. 

It's about two low level paper pushers at an insurance company who uncover cases of insurance fraud. They take it to their boss Bernie, who pretends to reward them by inviting them to his beach house for the weekend. What our heroes don't know is that Bernie's the one behind the fraud, and is planning on killing them. However the hit man kills Bernie first, and the two goofs then go through various hoops to make it look like Bernie's still alive.

The film was a modest success, pulling in about $30 million at the box office, but did have a whole second life on cable reruns and home video. This second life led to a sequel, which was as dead as its title character, but the first film just kept chugging along.

As the years went by Gladden became part of MGM, which is why they're being sued as well as Fox, and the filmmakers claim that during those years the money piled up, and they saw none of it.

They might have a case, but they will have a hell of a time proving it. Hollywood bookkeeping is a realm of shadows and madness, especially when the bulk of the revenue comes via television and home video.

SPEAKING OF MGM:

Watch this trailer for MGM's 90th anniversary and see if you can spot something most of the films have in common.

Did you see it?

Most of the films featured in that trailer were not made by MGM.

Most of MGM's original film library is now owned by Warner Brothers, leaving MGM more of a repository of the libraries of other companies rather than its own history. These include United Artists, Orion, Gladden, Polygram Filmed Entertainment, Cannon, and literally dozens more.

Says a lot about Hollywood.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1100: Weekend Wemake Woundup!

Got some remake news to discuss, so let's get started…

ANOTHER MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS

Fox has announced that they're joining forces with Ridley Scott's Scott Free Productions to produce a remake of their 1974 hit adaptation of Agatha Christie's 1934 novel Murder On The Orient Express.

For those who have lived in a cave the Christie novel follows Belgian master detective Hercule Poirot going from Istanbul to Calais on the legendary Orient Express. The train gets trapped in the snow in the Balkans, a shady businessman with a shadier past is brutally murdered, and Poirot has to sort through a gallery of exotic suspects to get to the truth.

As previously mentioned it was first produced in 1974, directed by Sidney Lumet and had an all-star cast led by Albert Finney in the role of Poirot, and was a commercial and critical success. A second modern-dress adaptation was done for CBS TV in 2001, with Alfred Molina as Poirot, but it wasn't very well received.

The most recent adaptation was in 2010 as part of the ITV/WGBH-TV Poirot TV series which has been running off and on since the early 1990s. This version starred British actor David Suchet as Poirot.

Now I think it's interesting that blockbuster mavens like Fox and Scott are interested in a period film that despite its large cast, takes place almost entirely on a train. That could make it an affordable production if they don't go all "A-List" on the casting.

Speaking of casting…

The role of Poirot is a very tricky one to translate to film. He's a very odd character, an eccentric, anal-retentive, obsessive compulsive, egocentric genius with a thick Belgian accent and a tendency to malapropism with a hyper-fastidious fashion sense that is considered old fashioned by 1934, that makes him easy to parody and hard to portray straight.

Albert Finney got an Oscar nomination for it, and Peter Ustinov played a popular, if less eccentric, variation of the character on the big and little screen, but it was David Suchet who came to define the role pulling off the appearance, mannerisms, and charm of the character without looking ridiculous.

Of course that's if the producers have any notion to take this project remotely faithfully. There is always a good chance that they'll cast Will Smith as rapping  & ass kicking American detective "Hercules P" and change the Orient Express from a train to a spaceship full of aliens.

NAKED GUN REDUX?

Paramount has signed comic actor Ed Helms to star as Lieutenant Frank Drebin in a reboot of the absurdist comedy classic The Naked Gun, which itself was a reboot of the prematurely canceled TV series Police Squad.

Now I find it interesting that they cast the star of the Hangover movies for this reboot, which was the complete opposite strategy that made the original so successful.

People don't remember what it was like to see Leslie Nielsen, the original Frank Drebin, play that character. Before his roles in Airplane! and Police Squad/Naked Gun Nielsen was best known as a dramatic actor in movies and especially television. He played serious, if not downright sombre, authority figures like senior cops, doctors, or sinister criminals.

He was not known for doing silly things, in fact his image, forged by decades of TV guest spots, was the exact opposite. So seeing him engaging in all that silliness was a refreshing novelty. It gave him a second career as an international box office star at an age when most actors are considering retirement.

People expect Ed Helms to do silly things, that's his image. That means no real surprises from this film, which doesn't bode well for its success. Which is sad when they could have done a straight up police procedural parody under another name, and not have the shadow of Nielsen hanging over it.