If you close your eyes and think really hard for a minute, a realisation hits you. If you’re a big movie fan like me then you will have seen a long list of movies more than once. I’m not talking about being crazy about “Lord of the Rings” and watching it every Saturday night like a ritual, I mean sitting in the cinema and either knowingly or unknowingly viewing a movie that is completely unabashedly unoriginal! Are we experiencing the death of original storytelling?
Remakes! We can’t escape them in contemporary Hollywood. But if you think back through cinema history, to be honest, they’re nothing new. In the early days of the film business, whether before the advent of sound, or during the studio system and the black and white film days, stories were continually rehashed, repackaged, adapted, and rereleased over and over for the express purpose of making money and entertaining the millions who were yet to be introduced to the domestic “convenience” of television.
Original versus Familiar
Now in the 21st century the postmodern internet generation seems rife with conjecture about the death of original ideas and how continually remaking previous hit films is sapping the enjoyment out of going to the multiplexes. Why do studios continue to make new versions of films that we’ve seen before? Well, there are a number of reasons. Quite obviously money is high on the list. How about creative vision? Can you improve on something that arguably was flawed in its original version, and have the audacity to think you can make it “better”? Perhaps you want to contemporize the story because the big shoulder pads and synthesizer-heavy soundtrack smacks of eighties bad hair days and will confuse the target audience who were born after 1995?! Films in other languages are pillaged and given the “Hollywood makeover” for “middle America”, unwilling and incapable of watching moving pictures while reading subtitles, and balancing supersize buckets of popcorn on their ample laps. Isn’t it just easier to produce, film, and market a movie that your audience can determine very quickly that they want to see? Remakes are not the only money-sure way for studios to cash in on public demand though.
Sequels
The summer of 2007 has seen a number of high profile movie sequels hit the big screens. I suppose the movie studios figure that what worked once will work again, and the way to entertain your audience is to give them what they want. Last Sunday I went to see “The Bourne Ultimatum”, the last outing (or maybe not?!) in a trilogy that has catapulted director, Peter Greengrass, into the mainstream. The film is a superb piece of cinema, and succeeds not just as a supposed conclusion to the Matt Damon trilogy, but could also be viewed as a stand-alone story. Likewise “Shrek 3”, “Evan Almighty”, the latest “Harry Potter” episode, “Ocean’s Thirteen”, “Spider Man 3”, “Rocky Balboa”, “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End”, and “Rush Hour 3” all arguably offer cinema-goers both familiar characters, and a new adventure, in the worlds that they know and love already.
There is much debate among film buffs and followers of pop culture about the concept of “originality”. If all we are fed is a diet of films that include “2, “II”, or a colon adding a new subtitle to a well-worn brand, in the title, then where is the space on the big screens for entirely new stories and original cinematic ideas? The website www.sequelogue.com pays attention to the number of remakes and sequels being churned out by Hollywood. “Is Hollywood running out of ideas?” they ask?
Show Me The Money!
Clearly the financial dictates of the film business are such that movie executives, whose shelf-life is often short, are wielding budgets of multi-millions with the pressure to deliver a return on their investment. They could push their chips onto a story about a disabled Eskimo girl who believes she can become a Winter Olympic champion (I don’t believe this story has yet been written), or politely inquire whether Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker might like to dust off their respective acting talents for another mad-cap adventure. After all, the last episode made the big bucks!
So what is it about remakes? Surely that’s a different phenomenon altogether? Making a new film to follow on from a popular and successful movie can have producers thinking they will knock “The Godfather Part II” from its mantle as “greatest ever sequel”. But would you throw the megabucks at a director to say “Hey, Coppola’s original “Godfather” movie was pretty good, but I was kind of put off by seeing Brando talking with cotton wool in his mouth. I loved Travolta in “Hairspray”! Is he free right now? Couldn’t we get him to do Corleone, and Chris Columbus can direct?” Not gonna happen. I hope.
Rose-tinted Childhoods
I’m pretty sure there is a lot of personal influence dictating what gets remade. When you look at which movies have had a subsequent remake, it’s clear that the impressionable childhoods of many a star, director or producer caused them to fall in love with one story or another. Maybe one exec went to a drive-through in the 1950s, got his first kiss, and has loved the movie that he saw that night ever since? It’s luck of the draw whether the movie that night was actually any good or not! A child of the 70s was inspired by a particular actor that made him or her want to become a movie star. Thirty years later their ego dictates that they want to bring the very same movie to the big screen, but this time with themselves in the lead role! I’m sure it happens.
And what constitutes a “remake” anyway? What if the medium changes? Is adapting a novel into a film a form of “remake”? When we read a story in novel form we create the characters in our minds, play out the story in our own personal worlds. Then somebody comes along and “adapts” the book into a movie and we go along to see characters we already “know”, only they’re not how we imagine them, and the protagonist is far too old to be given Brad Pitt’s body! Plays that were written for the stage are translated to the cinema screens. What was original in one form is remade into something else. Does a movie spin-off from a well-known and popular TV series constitute a “remake”? I would argue it does, particularly if time has passed between 60s or 70s series that is made with an entirely new cast some thirty years later. However, maintaining the small screen cast of “Sex and the City” for a forthcoming film can’t be labelled as a “remake”.
All remakes suck!
One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve trawled the web for debates about remakes is how clearly delineated the arguments are. The debate surrounding remakes never seems to get much further than “how did it compare to the original?” (invariably worse!), “why was it made anyway” (for money!), and “why is acting always worse in a remake?” This is a curious side argument in itself! What I did realise is just how many remakes I have seen. My research is by no means exhaustive, and I’m sure you can think of others that are not on my list. But to give you an idea about the recent world of remakes, I suggest that they can be grouped into a number of categories.
Remakes of famous TV series
When a loyal TV audience has the chance to see a film version of a series it has held close to its heart, you’d figure the movies would be popular. It’s not always the case though. 1994’s “Maverick” starred Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, and original star, James Garner, from the late 50s-early 60s western series. That was a successful remake for updating the original, while impressing critics and audience alike. The same (and more) could be said for the massive box office draw of the “Mission: Impossible” movie franchise, starring Tom Cruise, that has surely surpassed any comparison you make with the original series. Harrison Ford’s turn in the Oscar-nominated “The Fugitive” (1993) alongside Tommy Lee Jones would count as an improvement on the 60s series, although personal opinion may hold sway on 70s series such as “Charlie Angels” (Farrah Fawcett fans v. Cameron Diaz & Drew Barrymore aficionados), and “Starsky and Hutch” (is Ben Stiller’s wig worthy of comparison with Paul Michael Glaser’s mop?).
Remakes such as “The Avengers” (Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman), “The Mod Squad” (Omar Epps and Claire Danes), “The Dukes of Hazzard” (Seann William Scott and Jonny Knoxville), and “Lost in Space” (William Hurt and Matt LeBlanc) raise questions such as “why???”, particularly from avid fans of the originals. “The Addams Family” spawned both a film version and sequel, while British TV has inspired, rather than offered blueprints for, Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning “Traffic” and the less successful Robert Downey Jr. film version of Dennis Potter’s “The Singing Detective”. In the first case, the original series “Traffik” looked at drug smuggling from the Middle East, while Soderbergh’s film should probably be classed as an adaptation, since Stephen Gaghan’s screenplay transferred the action to North America. Family films such as “The Brady Bunch Movie”, “Scooby Doo”, “Inspector Gadget”, “The Flintstones” all met with rather less success than the originals, but “Transformers” was remade from an 80s cartoon into this summer’s big budget live action effects blockbuster. Perhaps the best example of a television series that received a worthy movie remake was Michael Mann’s ultra-cool “Miami Vice” starring Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx.
Remaking the Classics
More opposition seems to exist when directors dig into the archives and pull out respected classics from the past. In 2006, Sean Penn and an all-star cast featured in “All The King’s Men”. The original won the Best Picture Oscar for 1949, so any comparisons were likely to be tough on the remake. The 30s classic “Scarface” was remade, and definitely “reimagined”, in Pacino’s shoot-em-up from 1983, while 50s films such as the musical “The King and I” (remade as “Anna and the King” with Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat), “Sabrina” (the 90s version starred Harrison Ford), and “Father of the Bride” (remade with Steve Martin) were all less acclaimed than the originals. When the Coen Brothers attempted their southern US remake of Ealing comedy “The Ladykillers”, Tom Hanks and his mullet were critiqued for not being nearly as impressive, or sinister, as Alec Guinness in the British original.
The 60s have been plundered liberally for recent remakes. In the early 90s Robert De Niro starred in “Cape Fear”, in the role that Robert Mitchum had featured in originally. Family films such as “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (Johnny Depp playing Gene Wilder’s role), “Flubber” with Robin Williams (a remake of 1961’s “Absent Minded Professor”), or “The Nutty Professor” (Eddie Murphy twice reprising the 1963 film starring Jerry Lewis) have met with mixed reviews. Michael Caine’s films “Alfie” and “The Italian Job” have both been remade, with the latter featuring Mark Wahlberg, a particular fan of starring in films first shot in the 1960s, as he’s also made “The Truth About Charlie” (a remake of the 1963 Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn film “Charade”) as well as “Planet of the Apes”. For every miss like “Bedazzled” or “Psycho” (possibly the most lambasted remake due to Gus Van Sant’s creative decision to shoot like-for-like scenes in colour, of a Hitchcock classic no less!) there is a completely worthy remake like Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s Eleven” or “Casino Royale”. In the first instance, the Rat Pack original had little point to it, and plenty of scenes which felt like they had switched the camera on while Dean Martin and Sammy Davis drank whisky and sang next to a piano. The Bond film starring Daniel Craig was a far superior take on the Fleming novel, which in the late 60s had been filmed as a spoof with David Niven in the lead. I will also stand by Adrian Lyne’s remake of Kubrick’s “Lolita”, itself an adaptation of the Nabokov novel, and Jonathan Demme’s remake of John Frankenheimer’s tense 60s paranoia thriller “The Manchurian Candidate”, as decent remakes of impressive originals. You can also justify Mel Brooks’ involvement in remaking his 60s comedy “The Producers” due to the huge success of the theatre version in the past decade. In the pipeline is a remake of 60s fantasy film “Fantastic Voyage”. When it comes to films with special effects, the technological improvements must surely be a major reason to tempt producers to splash millions on the screen, even if they are remaking old stories.
The Seventies All Over Again
Films made in the seminal decade of the 1970s have been prominent remakes for the 90s generation and beyond. But here lies the problem! There are many great movies that were made by the Scorsese and Coppola generation. Unfortunately very few remakes have cut the mustard. When Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange starred in the 70s remake of “King Kong” there was considerable criticism, yet Peter Jackon’s decision to do the same as his follow-up to Lord of the Rings was extremely worthwhile, in my opinion, and tense as a film epic. But can the same be said for remakes of “The Day of the Jackal” (“The Jackal” starring Bruce Willis), “Get Carter” (Stallone instead of Michael Caine??), “The Poseidon Adventure” (“Poseidon” - what could be better than Gene Hackman and an upside-down Christmas tree?!), or “The Thomas Crown Affair” (Pierce Brosnan playing Steve McQueen’s part?). Director John McTiernan was guilty of the last of those films, and also helmed the remake of “Rollerball”. Comedian Chris Rock has starred in two remakes from 70s movies – the Burt Reynolds film “The Longest Yard”, and “Down to Earth” (previously “Heaven Can Wait” starring Warren Beatty, itself a remake!) “Superman” in the 70s with the iconic Christopher Reeve wearing the lycra will be better remembered than Brandon Rouse in any “remake”, but comic book adaptations are frequently made and remade so as not to truly justify their inclusion in a debate such as this.
Comedies such as “The Stepford Wives”, “The Out of Towners”, and “Freaky Friday” have all been remade, arguably to their detriment, but it is the horror genre that has been most criticized when it comes to updated releases. When the nature of the film is to scare and surprise, fans of the original “Halloween”, “The Omen”, or “The Wicker Man” are most obviously going to be disappointed when firstly they know what will happen, and secondly are bitter that somebody else is messing around with what is a perfectly good film to begin with! Perhaps one of the rare 70s movies to receive a degree of respect in both its original incarnation and remake thirty years later, was “Shaft”. He was the original detective John Shaft in 1971, but actor Richard Roundtree also played a role in the 2000 release as “Uncle John Shaft” to the star of the film, Samuel L. Jackson. Remake or sequel?! A very fine line in this instance!
How Long Do You Wait to Make it Again?
It seems it will only be a matter of time before the upcoming generation of actors, producers, and directors, raised on a diet of John Hughes, “Top Gun”, “Police Academy” and “Beaches”-style tearjerkers will start remaking the “classics” of their youth. Just this summer John Waters’ “Hairspray” (1988) was given the mainstream treatment with John Travolta and Michelle Pfeiffer lending the star names. Can a movie be made and its shelf-life be over so fast that a studio will take advantage of people’s short-term memories to remake it and release it again? The DVD generation are being fed re-released films with “20th Anniversary edition” packaged on them, and in many instances, getting to see movies for the first time. That is all well and good, but when will we see ads for a new version of “Amadeus” starring two actors whose previous credits are that they were teen heart-throbs in a California-based TV series? Or how about a remake of “Driving Miss Daisy” with a touch of race reversal? Oprah Winfrey can play Jessica Tandy’s Oscar-winning role, and Harrison Ford can drive the car in place of Morgan Freeman. Probably not necessary, but who knows! At what point do films from the 80s become fair game and desirable as fodder for remakes?
You’re Not From Around Here!
One very clear pattern is for Hollywood to celebrate the creativity of various international cinemas, be they French, Spanish, Italian, or Asian, and instead of trying to market them to the American people, and / or English-speaking audiences, simply get somebody to rewrite them and recast! In some examples the original casts themselves play the identical roles in English! The most recent Oscar-winner for Best Picture was Martin Scorsese’s Boston crime drama, “The Departed”. Contrary to being a purely original piece of cinema, the film is largely based on “Mou Gann Dou” (or to give it the English title, “Internal Affairs”) by the Hong Kong director, Alan Mak Siu. Notable other remakes from original foreign source material include “The Ring” (from the 1998 Japanese horror “Ringu”), and Soderbergh (again!) taking on Tarkovsky’s 70s sci-fi “Solaris”, this time with George Clooney in the lead. From Italian cinema, Al Pacino’s Oscar performance in “Scent of a Woman” owed much to the original “Profumo di Donna” from 1974, while Guy Ritchie directing his wife Madonna in a remake of Lina Wertmuller’s “Swept Away” was thought by many to be a terrible mistake. I have a lot of time for “The Last Kiss” starring Zach Braff, and have yet to see the original “L’Ultimo Bacio” which brought director Gabriele Muccino to Hollywood’s attention to merit guiding Will Smith to his Oscar-nominated performance in “The Pursuit of Happyness”.
Other Americanized remakes of non-English language cinema include “Shall We Dance?” for Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez, from the beautiful 1996 Japanese film, another Richard Gere performance in “Sommersby” (alongside Jodie Foster) transforming Gerard Depardieu’s role in the French picture “The Return of Martin Guerre”, Robin Williams and Nathan Lane camping it up in “The Birdcage” (from the 1978 French farce “La Cage Aux Folles”), and the Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage romance “City of Angels”, based on Wim Wenders’ 1986 German masterpiece “Der Himmel Uber Berlin” (“Wings of Desire”). After Christopher Nolan was acclaimed for “Memento” in 2000 he directed Oscar winners Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank in “Insomnia” just five years after the Norwegian original was released in 1997. Most prominent of all foreign films remade in America may have been the Cameron Crowe – Tom Cruise project “Vanilla Sky” that came out in 2001. Much was made of the decision to buy the rights to Alejandro Amenabar’s tense 1997 psychological drama “Abre Los Ojos”, not to mention the casting of Penelope Cruz in the remake to reprise her role of ‘Sofia’. Subsequent changes in the private lives of the film’s leads added some colour to the debates surrounding the remake, but did not help critics’ opinions after they had seen it.
Remaking The Future?
It seems that the trend for remaking films from the past will continue unabated. If we are lucky the true classics and gems of cinematic history will be left intact while a second tier of good films may be dusted off and given a new lick of paint in the form of a remake. Television will continue to offer original source material for new films as forthcoming projects will testify to. Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway are the reported stars of “Get Smart”, while “Magnum PI”, “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Knight Rider” all look set for film remakes. Following “Walk The Line”, James Mangold’s new film stars Christian Bale and Russell Crowe in “3:10 to Yuma”. It purports to be a remake that maintains the integrity of the original 1950s western. How you react to news of a remake very much depends on how you feel about the original! I am curious to know how the forthcoming “Sleuth” will turn out, with Kenneth Branagh directing Michael Caine and Jude Law. The 1972 film cast Laurence Oliver in the senior role, while the gimmick to the new version is that Michael Caine will let Jude Law play his original part. The brilliant Charles Grodin was the downtrodden husband on a honeymoon from hell in the 1972 movie “The Heartbreak Kid”. Now that the Farrelly Brothers have their hands on it, and Ben Stiller is playing yet another “victim”, we may be seeing something akin to “There’s Something About Mary” with a few more anatomy jokes! Even Alfred Hitchcock may not be safe from the remake treatment if rumours about a new version of “The Birds” are to be believed, not to mention “Chinatown” screenwriter Robert Towne attempting a remake of the 1935 classic “The 39 Steps”. Or is it merely a contemporary adaptation of John Buchan’s novel?! Finally, I’ve noticed that the wonderful “Logan’s Run” from 1976, capturing a futuristic vision of America’s decline (timed for the country’s 200 year anniversary, the bicentennial) is due for a remake to be released in 2010 with James McTeigue (of “V for Vendetta” fame) directing.
Is it all just about the money? Is there artistic merit and audience appreciation for new versions of films that audiences may (or may not) have seen before? Do TV series make for good movies, and are the memories of classics sullied by modern special effects and younger casts pasted over the faces of yesteryear? To watch a remake means we naturally compare with what has gone before. In some cases there is improvement, but in many examples we lose something by forging a replica or “adaptation”. At the very least a poor remake can bring an old film to a new audience as they “discover” another piece of cinema history. But don’t audiences deserve stories that are new, and filmmaking that doesn’t just invest heavily in special effects and stereotyped characters, but continues to enlighten human experience? I, for one, will continue to be selective in my consumption of cinema that merely remakes what has gone before, but ultimately it’s the masses who decide. Cinema is a democracy and money talks. If nobody lines up at the multiplex to see the next remake of an old favourite, then maybe the executives will hold on to their cheque books a little tighter in future.
