“Script Has Been Floating Around Hollywood For 75 Years”
From The Onion, a report on a script project that: “Has Had More Than 250 Stars And 300 Directors Attached, Been Rewritten 600 Times”:
BURBANK, CA — According to Hollywood sources, Warner Bros. Entertainment officially acquired the rights this week to the long- unproduced film project entitled The Final Symphony, which has reportedly been floating around in various states of production with seven different studios since 1935.
The script, believed to have been originally written seven and a half decades ago as a vehicle for Clark Gable, has since undergone at least 600 drafts by 2,250 different writers, and was at various times attached to hundreds of different Hollywood stars, including Spencer Tracy, Paul Muni, Tyrone Power, Montgomery Clift, Sidney Poitier, Burt Reynolds, Dudley Moore, Cher, Liam Neeson, and Justin Long.
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According to dozens of sources who have read some version of the script in the past 75 years, the film concerns a soldier coming home from war and, depending on which version of the script sources saw, is either a “seriocomic love story,” a “brooding psychological thriller,” a “wild cinematic joyride for the post-Tarantino generation,” or “a propaganda film financed by the War Department.”
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While Warner Bros. executives are reportedly happy with the shape the script is in, they said it would receive one final last-minute rewrite from screenwriters Scott Frank and Steven Kloves, as well as a polish from veteran writer William Goldman, who drafted a full rewrite of the script in 1966 when it was being conceived as a buddy picture for Robert Redford and Paul Newman, and did so again when it was being considered as a possible California Raisins claymation feature film in 1989.
“It’s been a bit of a rocky road for this project, but we intend to begin shooting very soon,” Warner Bros. CEO Barry Meyer said. “David Fincher had to pull out due to a scheduling conflict, but we are currently looking at a number of other directors, including Danny Boyle and David O. Russell.”
“Although Russell will only do it if we can get Jack Nicholson to commit for the role of the father, which is unlikely considering he passed on the part of the son in 1969,” Meyer continued. “In any event, we should be all systems go for sometime around spring 2015.”
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