Upcoming Attractions -A series of blog posts on upcoming film or tv releases, storyline by storyline. |
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#1:
The 'American Dream Cracks' Storyline 2018 'Sadly, the American Dream is dead.' - Donald J. Trump in 2015 when he announced his candidacy Although this being chosen first-up might seem because it's so timely, the fact is I'm tackling ![]() This also has a disillusioning effect on viewing earlier productions, so that for instance, watching Bill Cosby's old tv series is now a creepy experience - the revised perception being that the public face of "America's dad" 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.) A yet-untitled drama (work title Fair And Balanced) by Charles Randolph (The Big Short) on the #metoo allegations against the late newscaster Roger Ailes is also in the works. ![]() 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.) The latest news is that earlier-shot Billionaire Boys Club, an R-rated fact-based 'get-rich-quick' story written by director James Cox and Captain Mauzner (previously filmed in 1987 as a TV mini-series), with Kevin Spacey as an LA con man, had its release fatally delayed and on its opening day in August earned only $126 from ten cinemas. Other projects are seemingly being abandoned due to the likelihood of controversy - Playboy Enterprises halted a planned biopic (with Brett Ratner directing) about Hugh Hefner. |
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Other story setups revolve around actual moments of public trauma or disillusion, where there is a perceptible loss of confidence in 'the system'. The JFK assassination in 1963 was probably the first of these moments in the modern era. The Ben Jacoby-scripted drama Newsflash is set November 22, 1963, when CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite became the 'voice of America' in the aftermath of the JFK assassination. That also saw Vice President Johnson take over as President, the subject of the biopic LBJ, written by Joey Hartstone. The conspiracy theories that flourished in the wake of the JFK assassination may be part of the story of the 1965 fate of columnist Dorothy Kilgallen. This is to be dramatised as a film or limited series by filmmakers John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle, based on Mark Shaw's true-crime novel The Reporter Who Knew Too Much: The Mysterious Death Of What's My Line TV Star And Media Icon Dorothy Kilgallen. (The title says it all, though they'll need a shorter one for the marquee.) | ![]() |
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Kathryn Bigelow's
period drama Detroit, written by Mark Boal, focuses on the 1967 race riots prompted
by police brutality. Amblin Entertainment’s Trial of the Chicago 7, written
by Aaron Sorkin in 2007 for a production abandoned after a writers’ strike, covers the
1969 trial of the organisers of protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. (After the
Chicago police were filmed attacking demonstrators, bystanders and reporters alike, the resulting
federal indictments were seen as a political show trial, and it has been the subject of a series
of dramatisations since - list here).
Also 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 Front Runner,
written by political journalist Matt Bai, Jay Carson and director Jason Reitman, based on Bai’s
book All The Truth Is Out, opening on Election Day Nov. 6, covers the 1988 downfall
of Democratic presidential nominee Gary Hart following press coverage of an extramarital affair
he denied. |
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Left: The Post. Though set in 1971, the drama reflects ongoing American concerns about official lying. |
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The events dramatised
in the recently released drama The Post [on UK DVD 21 May 2018], which has the
Washington Post standing up to White House pressure not to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
(They upset many Americans as they showed the US govt knew the Vietnam War was unwinnable.) In
fact the documents were leaked to, and published by, the NY Times, but the Washington Post did
play a lead role in the Watergate scandal, as already told in All The President's Men.
There are two upcoming tv miniseries about this multi-faceted 1970s scandal which brought down
Nixon and made US conspiracy theory more mainstream. 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?) |
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Post-Kennedy
presidential assassination attempts are the subject of a couple of new dramas. A yet-untitled Warner
Bros drama being scripted by Daniel Pearle deals with the 2nd attempt to shoot President Gerald
Ford in September 1975. (The first was by one of the Manson Family, “Squeaky" Fromme,
but her gun misfired.) The 2nd attempt, by Sara Jane Moore, in San Francisco, led to ex-Marine
Oliver Sipple, who foiled the attack by knocking her gun arm, having his life ruined when he was
outed as gay by a friend, SF gay activist Harvey Milk, who wanted to publicise him as a 'gay hero'.
(Milk was himself assassinated along with SF's also gay mayor, in 1978). 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.) There is also Reagan, written by Howard Klausner and Jonas McCord, to star Dennis Quaid, which will cover RR’s life “from his childhood to his time in the oval office.” |
![]() 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. |
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Left: David Simon's 8-episode HBO series The Deuce, now embarking on Series 2. |
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The sleazy 70s New York porn scene (previously visited in Taxi Driver) is the setting of George Pelecanos and David Simon's 8-episode HBO series The Deuce, on "the birth of the modern pornography business in New York City in the early 1970s." Given the way Simon has demonstrated, in The Wire, how he can turn urban grime into state-of-the-nation drama, we should probably list this here without worrying about plot particulars. Season 2 will premiere in September. | ||
One longstanding
plot setup, which has roots in the postwar American novel (cf Thomas Wolfe), the 'you can't go
home again' setup, has few current development examples. There’s certainly no sign of a film
version of the recent big literary schocker here, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird
sequel Go Set A Watchman, published in 2015, to great consternation over its ‘revisionist’
view. (It has the protagonist’s ageing father Atticus now attending segregationist meetings.)
This may be related to the litigious nature of the author’s estate (she died in Feb 2016),
which recently tried to block a Broadway stage version of TKAM adapted by West Wing
creator Aaron Sorkin, on the grounds of some textual changes which seem to reflect awareness of
the GSAW followup. (That suit has been settled, but no word of any tv version of the new
play yet.) 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" which follows a one-dollar bill that changes hands and connects a group of characters involved in a shocking multiple murder." 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.) |
![]() Above: One Dollar - “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.” |
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A particular opportunity for nostalgia
currently being revisited is the US space program, whose glory days were in the 60s. |
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Americans getting
into trouble abroad became a staple plot setup in the 1970s-80s, as more US citizens travelled
to Europe and often got involved in the counterculture scene. Americans also discovered they were
resented as the world's wealthiest people, and often became the terrorist and kidnap targets of
choice. 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. |
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Left and above - 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.) |
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The US [in]justice
system has also been a focus. The issue of prosecutorial misconduct by suppressing evidence to
obtain a conviction, is flagged up in Trial By Fire, scripted by Geoffrey Fletcher
(Precious) from a New Yorker article by David Grann, about a Texas man executed in 2004
over a fatal arson fire which probably wasn’t. Another fact-based justice-system debacle
is recounted in Wasp Network, written by director Olivier Assayas [Carlos]
from Fernando Morais's book The Last Soldiers Of The Cold War, about the Cuban Five
/Miami Five. They were Cuban intelligence officers rounded up by the FBI in 1998, whose series
of trials rolled on for over a decade, until the Cuban Thaw. If Beale Street Could Talk,
the first English-language film of James Baldwin’s work, with his 1974 novel adapted by
director Barry Jenkins, “has doomed young lovers undone by police malfeasance and a
false accusation of rape.” The American who becomes so frustrated with the corruption of the US justice system that he turns vigilante is a story setup that became popular in the 1970s, its most commercially successful outing being the Death Wish feature series [1974-]. It continues with films like the 2014 The Equalizer, which has an upcoming sequel. The Equalizer 2 (2018), scripted by Richard Wenk, again uses the 1980s tv-series setup created by Michael Sloan and Richard Lindheim, of an ex-CIA black-ops agent retired but advertising his services to help others achieve justice [ie revenge] against those who are otherwise above the law. Written by director S. Craig Zahler [Bone Tomahawk], Dragged Across Concrete has a US patrol-cop duo suspended after being video'd brutalizing a suspect, and going on the make to replace their lost salary income by pursuing a Russian drug trafficker. The 159-min R-rated film has already generated controversy after it premiered at Venice, as the mercenary/ vigilante protagonists regard themselves as victims while others view them as everything wrong with US policing. To be released in 2020, the Warner Bros feature Just Mercy, written by Andrew Lanham, director Destin Daniel Cretton, and Bryan Stevenson, the defence lawyer in this case, based on Stevenson's 2014 memoir about trying to get an innocent black man released from death row. |
Below:
If Beale Street Could Talk |
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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.)
School-shooting massacres have become a what-is-America-coming-to topic, and this is the background to Vox Lux, written by director Brady Corbet, about “a female pop star who survives a school shooting and becomes famous writing and performing a tribute song to the victims, but evolves into a broken woman.” |
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The trauma of 9/11
is being relived in Only Plane In The Sky, written by Liz Hannah (screenwriter
on The Post) based on eyewitness accounts, set aboard Air Force One on the day when all
other planes except the president's were ordered to land or be shot down. The U.S. intelligence
failures which led to the CIA and FBI not coordinating to prevent 9/11, despite the many clues
it was about to happen, are the subject of Hulu's 10-ep drama The Looming Tower,
written by Dan Futterman, Alex Gibney, Lawrence Wright based on Wright's Pulitzer Prize-winning
nonfiction novel. Set in the days after 9/11 is the fact-based The True American, a human-interest drama being adapted by writer-director Pablo Larraín 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. However, Showtime’s announced 10-episode drama series Guantanamo created by Daniel Voll, which had a 2-hr opening ep to be directed by Oliver Stone due in October, has been abandoned for the time being, as it “got engulfed in the Weinstein scandal.” |
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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.) The Bush administration is also the subject of Vice, a biographical comedy-drama written and directed by Adam McKay (The Big Short), with Christian Bale bulked up to play Dick Cheney, US Vice President 2001 to 2009. | ![]() |
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Since the post-9/11 Gulf and Iraq wars of the 2000s, another plot setup has appeared within this storyline: the military veteran isolated on his return to America by PTSD. Thank You For Your Service, adapted by writer-director Jason Hall (who co-wrote Clint Eastwood's 2014 American Sniper), from David Finkel's 2013 book, deals with three returning Iraq vets. The Yellow Birds, adapted by David Lowery & R.F.I. Porto from the semi-autobiographical novel by Iraq War vet Kevin Powers, has a 20-year-old searching for a missing buddy while coping with his own PTSD. A Brotherhood, from writer-director Bandar Albuliwi, was inspired by an actual incident and has an Iraq war vet “forced to return to the Middle East after ISIS kidnaps his estranged brother.” | ||
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The failed “War
on Drugs” can also be regarded as a symptom of the failure of the American Dream, or at least
the disastrous failure of official policy. The chilling 2015 Sicario, written by Taylor
Sheridan, on the cross-border cartel-driven drug war turning the US justice system into a fig leaf
for black ops, has been followed up with a sequel, subtitled Soldado. Here, drug
running and people smuggling are officially classified by Washington as terrorism, and treated
with even greater ruthlessness. (It doesn't feature the same lead female character, and seems from
its trailer like more of a revenge-rampage drama, with an officially sanctioned 'sting' op that
goes wrong.) A 'Sicario 3' is also in the works, with no title or release date yet. On a related
theme, there is also Narcos: Mexico, Season 4 of Netflix’s series Narcos,
which is “to explore the origins of the modern drug war by going back to its roots.”
Drug-related Mexican border disputes reportedly also feature in FX’s Sons-Of-Anarchy
followup series Mayans M.C. written by Kurt Sutter, along with “strange
political bedfellows, the washing of dirty money and guilty consciences as well as hogs, betrayal,
ruthlessness and regret.” Netflix has also produced the drama series Amo, about the drug war in Philippines (long a US outpost), where officialdom has openly taken off the gloves in its war on drugs. Sylvester Stallone is filming Rambo 5, co-written with Matthew Cirulnick from the David Morrell character, where the embittered, 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.) 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.
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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. |
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The latest trauma for many suggesting
the American Dream is cracking has been Donald Trump's becoming President - despite losing the
popular vote to Hilary Clinton. The bestselling exposé Fire And Fury by
Michael Wolff, about "the first chaotic year of Trump's White House" is to become a TV
series from the company that produced Patrick Melrose. ("Michael Wolff is a total
loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book." -Trump
3am tweet.) HBO cancelled a project about the 2016 election following #Metoo allegations against
its writer, political journalist Mark Halperin, but it may continue with another writer. Zero
Dark Thirty writer Mark Boal is also working on a miniseries, yet untitled, about Trump's
election. (Earlier, we also had Donald Trump's The Art Of The Deal: The Movie,
a 40-min web-tv indie spoof written by Joe Randazzo, made in 2016 as a spinoff from the 'Funny
Or Die' HBO series, here pretending to be a 1988 docu made by DT himself, based on his 1987 book,
starring Johnny Depp and Ron Howard.) There's also an ongoing satiric animated tv series, Our
Cartoon President, which began as a segment on Stephen Colbert's late-night talk show,
with 17 episodes now commissioned. Trump is the subject of another half-hour mockumentary special
in Comedy Central’s The President Show series, written by Trump impersonator Anthony Atamanuik.
A President Show Documentary: The Fall Of Donald Trump “is set in the year 2030
and looks back at the last days of the Trump administration and the Commander in Chief’s
mysterious disappearance.” Created by Mark Taylor, a Florida firefighter suffering from
PTSD, and written by Rick Eldridge and Jimmy Hager, The Trump Prophecy is not
a documentary (it uses actors to portray real people), or a comedy (not intentionally anyway).
A £2m cinema feature made by staff and students of Liberty University, a Christian institution,
and being shown on the evangelical circuit, it “posits that God chose the philandering
billionaire to restore America’s moral values.” It is based on Taylor’s
book cowritten with Mary Colbert, The Trump Prophecies: The Astonishing True Story Of The Man
Who Saw Tomorrow And What He Says Is Coming Next. In the works is The Apprentice, a biopic being scripted by Gabe Sherman, a journalist specialising in political sex scandals, on 'how a young Donald Trump set himself on the unlikely path to become President'. (And, as Trump would put it in his mis-spelled tweets, "Make America Grate Again.") Also, The Thick Of It creator, director Armando Iannucci, has pitched [via Twitter] a “Dave-style comedy”: “Trump drugged and moved to a replica Whitehouse, where he carries on thinking he’s governing. Millions spent on hiring actors to play his staff, Senators, news anchors, people at rallies. There you go. Studios, your highest bid please.” One Tweet suggested the title Fake America Great Again. |
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Left: The Trump Prophecy “posits that God chose the philandering billionaire to restore America’s moral values.” Here, a demon sends the author-protagonist a message. |
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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
to be deported back to Jamaica. |
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The realist and
satiric works above are obviously quite different from the more romantic treatment of the storyline
from the viewpoint of frontline public services tv series, where week after week the protagonists
reassuringly fight to keep alive their corner of the American Dream (if not Superman's “Truth,
justice and the American Way”, at least their professional integrity in the face of
political corruption, bureaucratic incompetence etc.) New on the block in terms of police and emergency
services drama series are The Rookie, written by Alexi Hawley, inspired by a true
story, about the oldest rookie [at age 40] in the LAPD; Safe Harbor, which “chronicles
the colorful, complicated lives of cops on and off the beat”; Station 19,
set in a Seattle firehouse (evidently a spinoff - set in the same neighbourhood as hospital drama
Grey's Anatomy). The Good Fight (a spinoff from The Good Wife)
has the female partners of a Chicago law firm taking on police brutality etc cases. 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. Wolf also has a 13-episode order for his latest expansion of the franchise, Law & Order: Hate Crimes, based on New York's real-life Hate Crimes Task Force. |
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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. A movie is now officially
in the works. |
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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.) |
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The
cynical-sounding punningly-titled Americons seems to embrace two unrelated dramas,
one a 2017 indie drama about the mid-2000s US property market crisis, and the other a comedy drama
in the works for Sky One being scripted by English comedienne Catherine Tate, as a vehicle for
herself and her Scots costar David Tennant, playing a Brit couple who move to the US with high
hopes. 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.”) |
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A tv-series version
of an American classic novel sequence, John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ novels, which began
with Rabbit, Run in 1960, is being developed by Andrew Davies, regarded as ‘Britain’s
most successful literary adapter for television’ [House Of Cards etc]. Updike: ‘My
subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class’, characterised by men whose
high-school promise was never fulfilled. The 5-novel sequence ended in 2001, after winning awards
like the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. Since the original
May 2018 announcement, the 81-year-old Davies said he was struggling to convince his 20-something
female script editor the project was not simply endorsing the way men behaved then – the
matter of “how, in the era of #MeToo, TV and film-makers should depict behaviour that
is no longer considered acceptable.” |
![]() Above: A still from the earlier 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. |
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Finally, Steven Spielberg is remaking West Side Story, once described as "the souring of the American Dream wedded to Romeo and Juliet." The new adaptation is by playwright Tony Kushner [his 1993 Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia On National Themes won the Pulitzer Prize], who previously worked with Spielberg on Munich and Lincoln. |
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Storylines In Review 2018 |
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