Word: hollywood
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...everything old is new again? In Hollywood, it always has been. In the dream factory's prime, when the major companies cranked out 40 to 50 movies a year and there were no TV or video markets to extend a movie's shelf life, studios briskly recycled many of their properties. RKO filmed Raymond Chandler's novel Farewell, My Lovely as an episode of the low-budget Falcon series in 1942 and then remade it as an A picture (Murder, My Sweet) two years later. In predigital days, directors like Cecil B. DeMille, Leo McCarey and Alfred Hitchcock didn...
...difference between then and now is that moviemakers used to rely on other media--novels and plays--for most of their stories. These days, when few novels or plays are filmed, Hollywood must gaze into its past, big screen and small. Or raid the vaults of some other national cinema. Currently it's Japan's, with Shall We Dance, The Ring, The Grudge and this summer's Jennifer Connelly deep-creepie, Dark Water...
...could be said that nostalgia drives modern Hollywood. Middle-aged directors and moguls look back at the icons of their youth and think the next best thing to reliving their youth is remaking it. "Movie people these days are people who were very influenced by pop culture," says Hazzard producer Gerber. "And our tastes gravitate toward what I call comfort programming. It's why sometimes you want to go to A&W root beer. Starsky and Hutch? The Lord of the Rings? These things, if you were born in the '50s and '60s, are very relevant. If I could make...
...sweet memory for a film executive may be prehistoric to the kids Hollywood wants to woo. As Chris Rock says about The Longest Yard, "It's a 30-year-old movie. The young movie audience doesn't know it even existed. For those people, [the new one] is just its own movie." Besides, he asks, what's wrong with a remake? "[Plenty of] Hendrix songs are remakes, and the first couple of Beatles albums had a lot of somebody else's songs...
...fresh as any "original" film. Burton's two Batman films had a dark, loopy grandeur, and David Cronenberg's The Fly turned a routine science-fiction film into a parable of a man facing disintegration (into cancer, AIDS, madness) and fighting for his humanity. Some of Hollywood's all-time terrific films--His Girl Friday, Some Like It Hot, the Bogart Maltese Falcon--were remakes of earlier films. So, let's all go to the movies this summer. We may pay to see the familiar and--guess what?--be astonished. --Reported by Desa Philadelphia/ Los Angeles