-A series of blog posts on upcoming film or tv releases, storyline by storyline.
Although this being chosen first-up might seem because it's so timely, the fact is I'm tackling
this series alphabetically by storyline. This is by no means a new storyline, with coverage going
back well into the silent era. In this storyline, protagonists struggles to keep their notion of
the American dream alive in their own life. As with other storylines, there are Romantic and Realist
interpretations. In the Romantic school, the protagonists fight to keep the dream alive, and usually
manage - week after week if it's a tv series. The Realist approach means the protagonists fail
or become disillusioned. It
might seem a timely choice as first-up not just because of the crisis in US presidential politics,
but because of the #metoo scandal, where
once-revered role-model celebrity figures have been named by multiple complainants as sexual predators,
who for years have been using their fame and influence to intimidate or sideline complaints, or
their wealth to buy them off with gagging agreements, in potential criminal cases. Celebrity after
celebrity, often success-story embodiments of the American Dream, have been named, with no end
in sight. This has a disillusioning effect on viewing, so that for instance, watching Bill Cosby's old tv series is now a creepy experience - the revised perception being that the public face was just a clown mask. (Others have commented that the plot setup of Woody Allen's latest film, Wonder Wheel, about a man attracted to the stepdaughter of his partner, now seems creepy since the allegations about Allen resurfaced.) Studios have begun removing such earlier work from the tv schedules, as well as recasting or even partly reshooting current works, as happened with Kevin Spacey. Producers and directors have also been named, with alpha-male Hollywood kingpin Harvey Weinstein facing criminal charges. (David Mamet has already written a play, Bitter Wheat, about Weinstein; no word yet on a screen version, but Brian De Palma says he is developing a horror film called Predator, for an unnamed French producer, inspired by Weinstein.)
The bad old days
of the studios covering up crimes and misdemeanours seems at an end, with the prompt cancellation
of the Roseanne Barr show over some racist Trump-style 3am tweets a reflection of the new order.
What effect this background is having on works in development or production is not easy to say,
given that scripts are often rewritten during filming. A few projects have actually been killed off. Kevin Spacey has had his House Of Cards tv series wound up without him, and Netflix's Gore Vidal biopic Gore, where he played the title character, seems to have been abandoned in post-production. (He was also replaced, at great expense - his scenes reshot - as J. Paul Getty in the David Scarpa-written kidnap-drama feature All The Money In The World.) This was after Spacey was named in a series of sexual harassment complaints in the UK and US. However other projects may be cancelled over their subject matter being likely to stir up further controversy. Playboy Enterprises halted a planned biopic (with Brett Ratner directing) about Hugh Hefner, and there may be others we simply don't hear about.
As
to plot setups, among the “how are the mighty fallen” revisionist biopics of national
figures who fall from grace, just out is HBO's Paterno, written by Debora Cahn,
John C. Richards and David McKenna, about Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. “the
winningest coach in college football history,” whose career ended amidst a child sexual
abuse scandal. .png)
The
difference here is that the main character was not himself involved in any inappropriate liaisons,
but seems (just going by Wiki) to have simply failed to do more than report the matter internally,
where it was predictably buried. The concern here is the broader issue of institutional cover-up
(the theme of the 2015 award-winning newspaper drama Spotlight).
The issue of failures at the institutional level also comes up in the 'officer involved shooting'
plot setup occurring in dramas that are either fact-based or typical of incidents that seem to
be happening weekly in real life, and which often lead to urban riots. Director Reinaldo Marcus
Green says his feature debut Monsters And Men, about the police shooting of
an unarmed black man in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bed-Stuy (Spike Lee's old homeground) "is
inspired by the ongoing epidemic of race-related police brutality cases. It's talking
about the cycle rather than one particular case because these things are happening all the time
- it's happening everywhere, and I didn't want it to feel like one isolated thing.”
Similarly, the hour-long CBS drama [The] Red
Line, written by Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss, “explores what happens after
a white cop in Chicago mistakenly shoots and kills a black doctor.” The 10-episode
Netflix drama Seven Seconds, created by Veena Sud [The Killing showrunner],
follows events after a white police force covers up the hit-and-run of a black teenager by a
Jersey City cop. These are examples of the 'ripped from the headlines' approach to contemporary
drama.
Kathryn Bigelow's period drama Detroit, written by Mark Boal, focuses on the 1967 race riots prompted by police brutality. Also just out in the US is Chappaquiddick, written by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan, about the 1969 political scandal that ended Ted Kennedy's presidential aspirations of continuing the family dynasty.
The notorious 1969 'Manson Family'
cult murders, at the height of the hippie culture, of actress Sharon Tate Polanski and several
others in LA forms the background of the latest Tarantino film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood,
which focuses on people on the fringe of the showbiz community. (Manson himself died in prison,
age 83, some months ago - which put the story back into the headlines.) The killings are also
the subject of Charlie Says, a feature scripted by Guinevere Turner (the screenwriter
of American Psycho) from books by Ed Sanders and Karlene Faith, focusing on the involvement
of a prison worker in the rehab of 3 of the 'Family'.
The same events are covered from a more supernatural angle in the feature The Haunting
Of Sharon Tate, written and directed by Daniel Farrands. The pregnant actress was tortured
and murdered by the Manson Family and apparently had premonitions of being killed by a satanic
cult.
Left: The Post. Though set in 1971, the drama reflects ongoing American concerns about official lying.
George Clooney is backing an 8-part Watergate drama being written by Bridge Of Spies scriptwriter Matt Charman, for Netflix. (“The series is said to follow an individual who was significantly part of the Watergate scandal in each episode, following such players like Attorney General John Mitchell and Nixon counsel John Ehrlichman. The Watergate series will also be modelled after the Japanese drama Rashomon.”) And CBS TV is developing a series based on the 2012 novel Watergate by Thomas Mallon [director of Creative Writing at George Washington U], with a script by John Orloff [Band Of Brothers etc], which focuses on the politicians rather than the press. Meanwhile, the feature Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House, adapted by director Peter Landesman and John D. O'Connor from the nonfiction books by Felt (Woodward and Bernstein's "Deep Throat" source for Watergate), is already out in the US, though not in Britain. (His Deep Throat cover-name being taken already by a famous porn film, are they hoping a shorter, more marketable title will materialise?)
The 1981 attempt on President Reagan's life (by someone obsessed with impressing actress Jodie Foster) in Washington is the subject of Rawhide Down, a spec script by Alex Cramer, dramatising events in real time. (The Secret Service codephrase was also the title of the 2011 book by Del Quentin Wilber. This near-assassination was the subject of previous films, right.)
Above: the 2001 tv film The Day Reagan Was Shot written by its director Cyrus Nowrasteh, and [mouse over] National Geographic’s 2016 Killing Reagan, written by Eric Simonson from the 2015 book by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard.
Left: David Simon's 8-episode HBO series The Deuce.
The dark side of Small Town America is instead explored in CBS All Access’s new series created by Jason Mosberg, One Dollar, “set in a small rust belt town in post-recession America. The story follows a one-dollar bill that changes hands and connects a group of characters involved in a shocking multiple murder. The path of the dollar bill and point of view in each episode paint a picture of a modern American town with deep class and cultural divides that spill out into the open.”
There is also HBO's 8-hour adaptation of Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn's 2006 novel Sharp Objects, debuting in July, though here the protagonist only goes home, to the Missouri small town where she was born, as a reporter to investigate the murders of two girls.)
All this unease about contemporary trends has inevitably created a nostalgia for the [imagined]
good old days. A number of popular tv shows from the 1960s-80s, such as Lost In Space, Cagney
& Lacey, Dynasty, Magnum P.I., and Murphy Brown are getting reboots. "Networks
and streaming services are increasingly pulling from the past to flood the airwaves with reboots
and remakes," - Dr. James Francis, Jr., The Conversation. (Even the recently rebooted-and-cancelled
Roseanne may be recommissioned by ABC without the now PNG'd Roseanne Barr herself, as
The Conners.)
A particular opportunity for nostalgia
currently being revisited is the US space program, whose glory days were in the 60s.
First Man, adapted by Nicole Perlman and/or [accounts vary] Spotlight-scriptwriter
Josh Singer, from the biography First Man: A Life Of Neil is about astronaut Neil Armstrong’s
career ending with his being first man on the moon, in 1969. There is also an indie film titled
simply Astronaut, written and directed by Shelagh McLeod, now in post-production.
This has Richard Dreyfuss as a senior citizen who lost out on his chance to become an astronaut
when young, but now has a chance to rekindle his dream via a nationwide competition to win a
space trip.
The apparent kidnapping by Italian gangsters of the 16-year-old grandson of oil billionaire J. Paul Getty (his penny-pinching grandfather was sceptical and refused to pay) is the subject of two dramas. The David Scarpa-written feature All The Money In The World has Getty played by Christopher Plummer (replacing scandal-hit Kevin Spacey, whose scenes were reshot), while FX Channel's Trust, created by Simon Beaufoy, (with Getty played by Donald Sutherland) is a 10-part series on the same 1973 events, to be shown in the UK on BBC2.
Left - FX Channel's Trust: The story setup offers another 70s-era tie-in motif, the generation-gap clash over lifestyles and values, and the artwork reflects this. (Getty, considered the world's richest man, was obsessively frugal but collected paintings and presented himself as an arts-supporting philanthropist.)
The historically-based Paramount 6-ep miniseries Waco, created by executive producers John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle, dramatises a still-notorious debacle, the 1993 siege by paramilitary-style federal forces [over firearms paperwork] of a compound in Texas that led to a massacre of 76 people including children (many killed by burning CS gas) - and to greater distrust of the Feds by many Americans, as well as precipitating armed hostilities with other anti-govt groups and leading to further domestic terrorism. (The Oklahoma City bombing was claimed as a direct reprisal.)
Set in the days after 9/11 is the fact-based The True American, a human-interest drama being adapted for Kathryn Bigelow from Anand Giridharadas's nonfiction book, about immigrant Rais Bhuiyan, a Bangladesh Air Force veteran, who worked to save self-styled “Arab slayer” Mark Stroman from death row, after he shot Bhuiyan in the head and killed two other Muslim immigrants in a Dallas-area convenience store shooting spree. The CIA's notorious post-9/11 "war on terror" rendition and extreme interrogation programme is the subject of The Torture Report, written and directed by Scott Z. Burns.
Shock and Awe (2018), written by Joey Hartstone, about a group of journalists (including the legendary Joe Galloway of We Were Soldiers fame) from the Knight Ridder newspaper chain investigating the Bush White House's fake news story that Saddam Hussein had 'weapons of mass destruction' ready to use in 45 minutes, in order to justify their pre-planned 2003 invasion of Iraq. (As with the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, this was the start of a very long scandal which shook many Americans' faith in their government.)
Left: Sicario [2015], currently being sequelled [see below].
Netflix has also produced the drama series Amo, about the drug war in Philippines, where officialdom has openly taken off the gloves in its war on drugs. There's an industry rumour Sylvester Stallone is writing Rambo 5, where the ageing Viet vet takes on a Mexican cartel single-handed. (The earlier rumour was he would tackle ISIS in Iraq and Syria in this final outing, titled Last Blood, but his rep denied this.) A new version of Universal Pictures’ Scarface is also in the works, being billed as a "re-imagining", with a long list of scriptwriter names tackling it in turn, but no word yet how it will be updated in setting to make it contemporary, only that it will be set in LA - rather than in Chicago, as in 1932, or Miami, as in 1983. (Both earlier films had a factual background, using Al Capone and the Cuban Boat People respectively.)
The 2015 Sicario [above] was
a grim portrait of the US administration sinking into the mire of the cross-border drugs war,
with the sequel, Sicario 2: Soldado [below] evidently ramping up the ruthlessness of the [un]official
response.
Whereas the first Scarface
dealt with bootleg champagne etc as the great moneymaker in Prohibition America, the 1980s remake
had its gangster characters deal in cocaine brought in from South America, for this was by then
the drug of choice for those who could afford it. Cocaine has continued to distort American society,
as Sicario shows.
Season 2 of FX’s Snowfall,
created by John Singleton & Eric Amadio and Dave Andron, will cover “the early
days of the crack cocaine epidemic and its ultimate radical impact on the culture …of Los
Angeles as we enter 1984.”
Also possibly drug-related is the inspiration for a surreal ‘social thriller', Sorry
To Bother You, the debut feature of musician-turned-filmmaker Boots Riley. Here, a California
telemarketer “discovers a magical key to professional success, which propels him into
a macabre universe.”
Re the USA’s
biggest current who-are-we national-identity-crisis controversy, the enforced separation of immigrant
children from their parents, there is at least one related work in development, an MGM/WB film,
scripted by Tracy Oliver. from Nicola Yoon’s YA bestselling novel The Sun Is Also
A Star, about a Jamaican girl in New York who falls in love just before her family is
about to be deported back to Jamaica.
An instant nostalgia has evidently set in re Trump’s predecessor, and there is a new Obama
biopic feature in the works for 2020 release. Two 2016 indie films [Barry and Southside
With You] already covered his early years, but this will cover his two presidential terms.
Based on the just-out but already bestselling memoir by Deputy National Security Advisor Ben
Rhodes The World As It Is, its producer (Likely Story’s Anthony Bregman)
describes it as “The Right Stuff by way of Frank Capra, and it’s exactly what
we need.”
And the longest-running 'lawfare' series of all, the cops-and-prosecutors investigative-procedural drama Law & Order, has officially ended its 20-year broadcast run, but its creator Dick Wolf says he hopes to continue it under other auspices. With its focus on 'ripped from the headlines' plots, a relaunched L&O should, in Trumpian America, not lack for what is called 'hot button issue' material.
Showrunner Dick Wolf is currently producing a new procedural series, simply titled FBI, also set in NYC. This will also likely have plots built around contemporary issues. It won't air till autumn 2018 but the episode being trailed on YouTube etc has a white-supremacist financier behind a sophisticated bombing campaign designed to provoke a race war.
At the lower
end of the economic spectrum, we also have Americans struggling to make ends meet in the face
of medical etc bills and being led to desperate measures, perhaps drug-related. (Breaking
Bad may have been a trendsetter here, though the plot setup often also reflects the Thoreau
quote about the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation.)
In The Mule, written by Nick Schenk, a bankrupt 90-year old (played by Clint
Eastwood) takes on a driving job which turns out to be acting as a drug courier for a Mexican
cartel. In post-production [and not to be confused with an earlier horror film of the same title]
is the indie thriller All Creatures Here Below, written by David Dastmalchian,
which uses the young-couple-on-the-run plot setup. ABC's False Profits
pilot, set in the world of cosmetics marketing, written by former Code Black writer-producer
Kayla Alpert, is described as “Desperate Housewives meets Glengarry Glen Ross. It follows
a team of down-and-out women in suburban Arizona.” Claws, TNT's “darkly
comedic series about five manicurists in a South Florida salon” may be comparable.
In writer-director Courtney Moorehead Balaker's feature Little Pink House, based
on the nonfiction book, a Connecticut nurse campaigns against a corporation abusing 'eminent
domain' rights of way to bulldoze homes in her working-class neighbourhood, the case going all
the way to the US Supreme Court.
The Fall Of The American Empire is Quebec filmmaker Denys Arcand's belated follow-up
to his 1986 adult-conversation drama The Decline Of The American Empire. This has an
academic reduced to working as a delivery driver to make ends meet and stumbling on terrible
temptation - a pile of cash from a hold-up gone wrong.
With the economic crunch, the idea of 'downsizing' one's lifestyle is a popular idea. The premise of the satire Downsizing, co-written by director Alexander Payne with Jim Taylor, is to take the idea literally, with the protagonists scientifically reduced to 5” high to save expenditure on resources, but - according to the reviews - discovering social problems persist regardless in their new small-scale planned community.
Here And Now, an HBO comedy-drama series by Six Feet Under creator lan Ball, described as “a provocative and darkly comic meditation on the disparate forces polarizing present-day American culture” evidently proved over-ambitious for a mainstream US audience, with its diverse domestic setup involving “the members of a progressive multi-ethnic family - a philosophy professor and his wife, their adopted children from Vietnam, Liberia and Colombia, and their sole biological child - and a contemporary Muslim family, headed by a psychiatrist who is treating one of their children.” (There's also a supernatural aspect.) It has not been renewed but Season One is still out there [trailer here].
Another 'all-in' melting-plot setup seems to be Universal TV's ensemble drama The Village, written by executive producer Mike Daniels (Sons Of Anarchy), about residents of a NYC apartment building interacting. ("All under one roof are a recovering war vet, a pregnant teenage girl and her single mom, a cop with an unexpected love interest, a woman hiding a terrifying secret from her husband and a millennial lawyer who might find his grandfather is the best and worst roommate he ever could have hoped for.") The premise seems to be all-human-life is here, at least as found in contemporary America. (The setup where protagonists, having moved away from their birth family, find social support in the big city via their work colleagues or room-mates is of course nothing new.)
The low-budget indie production Walden: Life In The Woods, scripted by Adam Chanzit, has 3 modern-day protagonists (in 3 separate plot strands) trying to keep the dream alive in their own way, by touching base with the ideas of a classic American-dream text, Thoreau's Walden. (That's the 1854 text that opens its argument for living 'deliberately' with the setup line “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”)
Right: Still from the unsuccessful film version of Rabbit, Run, announced in 1963 and released in 1970; it was adapted by its producer Howard B. Kreitsek, and re-edited by the studio.
