-A series of blog posts on upcoming film or tv releases, storyline by storyline.
'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 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 struggle 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 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.
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.) 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.
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 can 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. The Hate U Give, adapted by Audrey Wells from a best selling novel by
Angie Thomas, has a young black female protagonist caught up in a traffic-stop shooting, then
caught up in the resulting political crossfire.
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.
Sam Greenlee’s 1969 spy novel The Spook Who Sat By The Door, described
as ‘the first black nationalist novel’ (and filmed in 1973 adapted by Greenlee and
Melvin Clay), is being developed as a tv series [no writer yet]. This has the CIA’s first
African-American hire discover he is only an equal-opps token hire when he is assigned to the
photocopy room, and return disillusioned to his Chicago gang roots to politicize gang members
to fight in the Black Revolution. (The 1973 film evidently had its release suppressed by the
FBI, cf here.)
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.) Season 2 of true-crime
series Mindhunter is reportedly to focus on Manson. The killings are also the
subject of Charlie Says, a feature premiered at the Venice Film Festival, scripted
by Guinevere Turner (the screenwriter of American Psycho) from books by Ed Sanders and
Karlene Faith, on the involvement of a prison worker in the rehab of 3 'Family' women.
The killings are covered from a more supernatural angle in the feature The Haunting Of
Sharon Tate, written and directed by Daniel Farrands. The pregnant actress, tortured
and murdered by the Manson Family gang, apparently had premonitions of being killed by a satanic
cult. There is also Tate, a feature drama to be made by the husband and wife
team of Michael Polish and Kate Bosworth, on the actress's life rather than her death.
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.) 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.
Left: David Simon's 8-episode HBO series The Deuce, now embarking on Series 2.
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.”
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 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.)
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 four episode Netflix limited series Central Park Five, based on a controversial
real-life injustice, will dramatise how 5 teenagers from Harlem were unjustly convicted of the
rape of a jogger in NYC’s Central Park.
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
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.”
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.”
Left:
Sicario [2015], currently getting a 2nd sequel [see below]. In the aerial shot at left is a stretch
of the border wall between US and Mexico now much in the US news. Sicario 2 has been successful
enough that Sicario 3 is planned.
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.
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, covers “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.”
Driven,
the John DeLorean biopic written by Colin Bateman (The Journey) is also drugs-related,
with the collapse of the maker of the sports car featured in the 1985 Back To The Future
being due to trying to raise some needed millions for his car-making company via cocaine deals.
The press notice describes is as a “wickedly comedic look at a bromance gone bad.”
(DeLorean was caught via his good-buddy relationship to a criminal turned FBI informant).
The Cartel, adapted by Shane Salerno [Savages] from a real-life tale
of the Mexican-American drug wars over the past decade. A DEA agent spends years pursuing the
head of El Federación, the world's most powerful cartel, who murdered his partner.
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.
'Sadly, the American Dream is dead.' - Donald J. Trump in 2015 when he announced his candidacy.
(Irony seems to be lost here.)
The Trump Prophecy is based on a book which predicts that 'Obama will be
charged with treason and Trump will authorise the arrest of “thousands of corrupt officials,
many of whom are part of a massive satanic paedophile ring”. Trump will also force the
release of cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s that are currently being withheld by the pharmaceutical
industry.'
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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. And in American Dreamer, co-written by Daniel Forte and director Derrick
Borte, “a down on his luck HAIL [rideshare] driver who makes extra cash chauffeuring
a low level drug dealer around town, finds himself in a serious financial bind and decides to
kidnap the dealer's child.”
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. Actor Paul Dano has described his directorial
debut Wildlife, adapted by him and his partner Zoe Kazan from the novel by Richard
Ford, as being about the American dream as ‘something that I’ve found just really
beautiful and hard’. The plot has a teenage boy in 1960s Montana witnessing the breakdown
of his parents’ marriage.
Writer Kevin Williamson’s 10-episode series Tell Me A Story is based on
an Argentinian series but set in today’s US (Williamson: “we are living in “rage
America” where everyone’s so divided”), using fairytales as springboards.
Here, ‘The world's most beloved fairy tales are re-imagined as a dark and twisted psychological
thriller set in modern day New York City, the first season of this serialized drama interweaves
"The Three Little Pigs," "Little Red Riding Hood," and "Jack and the
Beanstalk" into an epic and subversive tale of love, loss, greed, revenge, and murder.’
Awareness of international financial chicanery has become wider since the Crunch –
the economic crash of October 2008. The latest development here is the release in 2015 of the
Panama Papers. Jake Bernstein’s book Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers is
to be the basis of a Steven Soderbergh-directed drama from a script by Scott Z. Burns. The
Laundromat 'follows a group of journalists who take part in unearthing 11.5 million
files, linking the world's most powerful political figures to secret banking accounts to avoid
taxes.' An earlier Crunch, in October 1987, the worst stock market crash in Wall Street
history, is being dramatised in Showtime’s comedy series Black Monday,
created by David Caspe (Happy Endings) and Jordan Cahan (My Best Friend's Girl).
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, and now out on DVD worldwide, was 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.”)
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.
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.
