New Paddy Chayefsky movie?

It’s often fascinating what one can discover while plowing through the day’s announcements of Hollywood movie deals. Take this from Deadline. Your basic PR piece going through the list of projects writer-director Harris Goldberg has going. One of the projects caught my eye:

On the film side, Goldberg, who wrote and directed the 2007 indie Numb, is attached to direct The Tenth Man, written by Paddy Chayefsky & Marshall Brickman and produced by Victoria Tennent & Kirk Stambler.

“The Tenth Man”? Co-written by Paddy Chayefsky (Hospital, Network) and Marshall Brickman (wrote Sleeper, Annie Hall, and Manhattan with Woody Allen)? What hidden gem could this possible be?!?!

So I dug around and found this: A 1989 review of the play “The Tenth Man” by none other than NY Times columnist Frank Rich:

‘’The 10th Man,’’ Paddy Chayefsky’s drama about the dwindling congregation of an Orthodox synagogue on Long Island, is ideal seasonal fare for those who like their holiday plays to go on as long as Hanukkah.

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The main business of ‘’The 10th Man’’ is to reassure the audience of the power of faith — a task Chayefsky undertook with the same sunny alacrity of ‘’The Sound of Music,’’ which opened on Broadway the week after his play (and which, unlike his, at least took pains to acknowledge the shadow of the Holocaust). The evening’s catalyst for spiritual renewal is Evelyn (Phoebe Cates), the 18-year-old granddaughter of one of the synagogue’s elders.

Evelyn has been diagnosed as a schizophrenic with violent tendencies but just may be possessed by a demon — a dybbuk. In her fits, she has delusions that she is, variously, the whore of Kiev and Susan Hayward. Before modern psychiatry attempts its miracles, the men of the congregation want to give an old-fashioned exorcism a try.

For there to be a religious ceremony, however, the straitened synagogue must round up a minyan — or, to use this production’s curiously Anglicized diction, a quorum of 10 men. The 10th man is almost literally blown through the door in the form of Arthur Brooks (Peter Friedman), an ill-shaven young lawyer reeling from a divorce, disenchantment with Communism and an excess of both alcohol and headshrinking. Arthur believes that ‘’life is utterly meaningless.’’ Along with the congregation’s new go-getting young Rabbi (Michael Mantell), he is the playwright’s symbolic caricature of the ostensibly materialistic, Freud-obsessed, overassimilated American Jews who were fleeing orthodoxy for suburban country clubs, psychoanalysis and color television when ‘’The 10th Man’’ was written.

You can be sure that Chayefsky, representing the interests of theater-party audiences of his time, will teach a lesson or two to the skeptical Arthur and all those other Reform Jews who ‘’sit around like Episcopalians, listening to organ music.’’ But first he contrives a romantic subplot that reduces both young characters to cooing boulevard-comedy juveniles right out of the Kaufman and Hart plays that the temple’s new rabbi hopes to produce for fund-raising purposes.

In its eagerness to pander, ‘’The 10th Man’’ seems as cynical now as the television programming that Chayefsky would later attack in his screenplay for ‘’Network.’’ Everyone on stage is lovable, and the trick ending is so contrived and sentimental that even the cast seems to disbelieve it. The dramaturgy is often as crude as the message. Characters recite their autobiographies at the drop of a prayer shawl. The phone-call traffic is heavy. There is no end to the spelling out of themes (‘’Here you have the decline of Orthodox Judaism graphically before your eyes’’) and footnoting of background information (the unenlightened of 1959 are reassured that mental institutions offer ‘’the benefit of trained psychiatric personnel’’).

Pretty lackluster review, although the Phoebe Cates reference is intriguing.

What do you think is currently driving this project? A belief that the general public is just dying to see of a group of elderly Orthodox Jews performing an exorcism on a girl who may be possessed by a demon? Or it’s a project with Chayefsky’s name on it?