Whoa, I just had the craziest dream – a nightmare, really – in which no one responsible for creating our mass entertainment ever had an original idea again!...He has a point...
Why not replace Tobey and Kirsten with Andrew and Emma, and just make “Spider-Man 4″ – with a new tone, a new costume, a new production design, whatever – instead of forcing us to sit through Uncle Ben’s murder again?...
For God’s sake, Warner Bros. is reportedly planning to reboot Batman again after “The Dark Knight Rises,” because why leave the property alone for five minutes? Why leave any property alone? (When is Hollywood going to make a gritty reboot of “Schindler’s List”? You know, darker and edgier.)
Long, long time readers may know that every now and then I come up with movie ideas that never get made. Given Hollywood's dire originality crisis, I should list some that I can remember off the top of my head, hoping that some screenwriter somewhere will work on these:
* The Secret Life of Immanuel Kant: reputedly he died a virgin who never travelled far from his home town of Konisberg, but few people realise during his 'silent decade', he led a double life as a ladykilling spy for the king of Prussia.
* Tesla: a very eccentric inventor who may, but probably didn't, invent a death ray, and had all sorts of odd ideas as well as inventing some useful stuff. Maybe he heard alien voices on the radio. Lots of material to work with here: I think his actual meeting with aliens might work, or some intrigue with government concern over what he was actually inventing. He has appeared in a couple of films, but they aren't well know and probably are not improbable enough.
* the Wittgenstein family were all as mad as cut snakes, with an unusual number of homosexual siblings, although two of them committed suicide. I don't know: maybe a comedic "neighbours from hell" movie could be made about a family who lives next door to them.
* World War 2 untold stories: well, there are just thousands of intriguing stories that turn up on SBS on Friday nights and indicate that we are never going to run out of source material. Has the early life of Hitler ever been dealt with in a movie? Was it Wittgenstein in school who turned him against Jews, or a Jewish prostitute from whom he caught a venereal disease? Could be dangerous ground to cover, I guess. What about the accidental sinking of the Cap Arcona (killing about 5,000 prisoners from concentration camps) at the end of the war as a basis for a movie?
* Spiritualism: I don't think the originators of modern spiritualism (the Fox sisters) has ever been the subject of a movie, nor the general topic of its widespread popularity in the late 19th and early 20th century. Maybe hard to come up with a happy ending, but it's an odd story.
What the heck? All these ideas are for movies set in the past. Don't I have any ideas for movies set now or in the future?
Well, in science fiction terms, there has never been a movie about the exploration of the Moon. Yet the place almost certainly has old lava tubes, icy parts, and a certain amount of gas filled chambers which cause the occasional eruption as seen from Earth. I'm not sure what the main point of such movie could be - finding an alien artefact is so 2001 - but surely there is some good material that should be based there. (Now that I think of it - although it's been a long time since I read it - Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of his more readily filmed novels, but it's never been attempted. Mind you, for some reason, most movies made from his source material don't work, or are barely recognizable.)
Supernatural agents (or humans under their instruction) who work to prevent the scientific discovery of an afterlife or proof of God seems potentially promising as well, and I don't want M. Night Shyamalan going anywhere near the idea either.
And what the forthcoming Climate Wars? Is having an admiral turn into a modern Captain Nemo with a nuclear sub or two being used to take out large coal fuelled power plants in both China and the US just a little too James Bond? Ships carrying coal could be sunk by torpedoes too. Maybe this has already been done in some novel I have never noticed...
That's it for now. Someone just send me a cheque when you sell the script.
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