“Film studios ramping up remakes”

This Hollywood Reporter article will be old news for GITS readers, as we’ve posted on Hwood’s remake mania here, here, here, here, here, and here. But the HR piece provides a nice overview and some choice quotes from Hwood movie-makers. To wit:

Studios have been remaking movies pretty much since they began making them, but during the past year and particularly the past few months, the remake machine has gone into overdrive.
 
 The 1980s have turned into a full-fledged garage sale of titles. “Romancing the Stone,” “Footloose,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Dune,” “The Karate Kid,” “Red Dawn,” “RoboCop,” “The Big Chill,” “Arthur,” “Ghostbusters” and “The NeverEnding Story” are but a few of the titles from that decade being developed around town.
 
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Producers say it is now common for them to go down the list of hits from another decade to see what might be easiest both legally and creatively to package and set up at a studio.
 
 “If you’re trying to get a movie made now, you can push the rock up a mountain or you can push it on flat ground,” said one studio-based producer, explaining the rationale for remake mania. “And most of us would rather push it on flat ground.”
 
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If it’s harder for producers to sell a pitch, then they enjoy the option of letting the familiar title speak for them.If marketing budgets are tighter, then studios can rely on built-in brand awareness when they prepare promotion and publicity campaigns.
 
 “For original movies, you need to advertise the idea, the story — it’s about convincing people that it’s worth seeing,” one executive said. “With something that is branded, no education is required.”

For an established screenwriter, the remake mania doesn’t shift the terrain all that much as their reps simply put their clients up for remake assignments. But for aspiring screenwriters trying to break in, there’s no way to sugarcoat this trend: It makes it harder because the studios are more likely to spend development funds on safer projects (read: remakes) than originals. 

What can you do? After the inevitable depression, push yourself to come up with even more unusual ideas for a spec script. Because if the studios load up on remakes, it makes sense that when they do go fishing for a spec, they could be more likely to go after something even more unique, more original, more distinct. Witness what happened to “rookie scribe” Jason Micallef in another HR article:

So said Mandate when it optioned “Butter,” rookie scribe Jason Micallef’s original comedy screenplay. Jennifer Garner is attached to star and possibly produce with Michael De Luca.

Late last year, Micallef scored the one-two punch of winning a Nicholl Fellowship and landing the third slot on the unofficial Black List of 2008 with his political satire set in the small-town world of competitive butter-sculpting.

Think about that: Butter-sculpting. Hard to imagine a less commercial subject for a script. Not Micallef who found inspiration:

“I wanted to do a political satire,” Micallef said, “and I was looking for some venue that people take very seriously but is also ridiculous — like politics — but at the same time is really visual.”

So the writer, who hails from Gloucester County, Va., flashed back to a fuzzy post-college road trip through a scorching August that resulted in a five-hour detour to the refrigerated building of the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, which housed competitors’ prized butter sculptures.

“I wish I knew why,” Micallef said. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

And seems like a good idea now:

Micallef, repped by Endeavor and Josh Turner McGuire, has sold a pitch to Showtime with DreamWorks TV, and he is rewriting the screenplay for “The King of Kong” for director Seth Gordon at New Line. Micallef is also working on an original comedy script with “Milk” producers Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen.

So once again, screenwriting boils down to The Hero vs. The Machine. 

The Machine is hooked on remakes.

The Hero finds inspiration in butter.

If you want to read Butter, the 2008 Nicholls winner, you can download the script here.

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