Why so many new releases are remakes of old movies

01:00 AM EST on Saturday, April 3, 2004

BY GLENN LOVELL
Knight Ridder Newspapers

The great John Huston, whose resume included The African Queen and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, had little good to say about his industry's maddening habit of repeating itself. "Don't remake good movies," the director once groused. "Remake bad ones!"

What would Huston think of the current glut of Hollywood remakes? Everywhere you look these days there are big-budget redos: Dawn of the Dead, Ned Kelly and The Ladykillers -- all, ahem, "re-imaginings" of cult favorites.

They follow in the choppy wake of numerous star-vehicle remakes, including Swept Away with Madonna, Cheaper by the Dozen with Steve Martin, Freaky Friday with Jamie Lee Curtis, Ocean's Eleven with George Clooney, and The Italian Job, Planet of the Apes and The Truth About Charlie (a modern-day Charade) all with Mark Wahlberg, Hollywood's Remake King.

Technically speaking, the last two best-picture Oscar winners were remakes. Chicago is a musical version of the silent Chicago from 1927 and Roxie Hart from 1941, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy owes something to Ralph Bakshi's animated LOTR, which covered a book and a half of the trilogy in 1978.

Just yesterday:

Walking Tall, with the Rock now meting out vigilante justice in a Pacific Northwest town full of drug dealers.

Around the corner:

The Alamo (April 9), with Billy Bob Thornton as an unlikely stand-in for Duke Wayne's musket-wielding Davy Crockett.

The Stepford Wives (June 11), with Nicole Kidman taking over for Katharine Ross as a newcomer to a town full of automaton hausfrauen.

The Manchurian Candidate (July 30), with Denzel Washington subbing for Frank Sinatra as a war veteran racing to foil a programmed assassin.

Alfie (Sept. 17) with Jude Law as the charming louse originally played by Michael Caine.

And that, friends, is just for starters.

Now in various stages of production, pre-production or script rewrites are updates and/or comic variations of El Cid, Suspicion, House of Wax, The Poseidon Adventure, War of the Worlds, Flight of the Phoenix, The Shaggy Dog, Straw Dogs, Two Thousand Maniacs, Logan's Run, Precinct 13, The Wild Bunch, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Pink Panther, The Longest Yard, The Hills Have Eyes, The Defiant Ones, Fun with Dick and Jane, Bell, Book and Candle, Fahrenheit 451, Valley of the Dolls, I Married a Witch, The Women, Superfly and The Swimmer, with Alec Baldwin taking over for Burt Lancaster as the neurotic Everyman who vows to "swim home."

There are so many remakes in the pipeline -- Peter Jackson has swapped Hobbits for King Kong, Adam Sandler and Chris Rock are giving The Longest Yard a comic makeover, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have teamed up again for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory -- that rather than ask, "What's next?" it almost would save time to enumerate those rare original-screenplay projects.

Same old, same old

Remakes, of course, have been around for as long as celluloid has flapped through a projector. "Remakes are a staple of Hollywood: In the old days, the studios remade their hits every five or six years," says director Phil Kaufman, whose Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) is that rare remake that's as good as or better than the black-and-white original (directed by Don Siegel in 1956).

"They're part of the American movie-going diet," agrees Paul Dergarabedian of Exhibitor Relations, a box-office tracking service. "Studios have always returned to their archives, sometimes with huge success, sometimes with disastrous results." (Jonathan Demme's The Truth About Charlie, wherein Wahlberg and Thandie Newton stood in for Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, qualifies as one of the most recent disasters.)

The 1932 back-lot nugget What Price Hollywood? became A Star Is Born with Janet Gaynor (1937), then Judy Garland (1954), then Barbra Streisand (1976). High Sierra with Bogie became I Died a Thousand Times and Colorado Territory. The Depression-era tearjerker Little Miss Marker, originally starring Shirley Temple, is brushed off every 20 years or so (mostly recently in 1980 for Walter Matthau and Julie Andrews).

Not even Capra, Ford, Hitchcock and, yes, Huston were above the practice. The first three remade their own hits; Huston made his directing debut with the second, and much superior, remake of The Maltese Falcon. Huston's own noir classic The Asphalt Jungle was remade three times by others, once as an Egyptian caper, once as a western.

Short memories

The need to update and re-cast seems especially prevalent at the moment. How come?

Pat answer: As established "name brands," they can be relatively safe from a financial standpoint. "A movie is remade precisely because it was a success, and it feels like it's surefire," explains Paul Seydor, author-editor-director of an Oscar-nominated short on The Wild Bunch.

And when the average price of a studio film is $40 million, playing it safe has never been more important. Universal was hardly going out on a limb with its remake of the 1978 zombie classic Dawn of the Dead. The new digitized, Milwaukee-set version comes with exploitable title and built-in audience. Little wonder it opened in the number-one spot two weeks ago, grossing more than $27 million.

"You have a sort of built-in thing," notes Seydor. "You're OK as long as you don't touch something that's absolutely a sacred cow, like Citizen Kane or Treasure of the Sierra Madre."

Also, many in today's 14-to-27-year-old target audience aren't familiar with the original Dawn of the Dead or Ocean's Eleven. To their young eyes, the remake is the original.

"Our memory is pretty short right now," says Kaufman, whose credits also include The Right Stuff, Quills and the current Twisted with Ashley Judd. "Unfortunately, we no longer live in a film culture. The history of film doesn't extend much beyond the Spielberg era."

Dergarabedian agrees. "These filmgoers have no idea that they're seeing a remake," he says, pointing to Dawn of the Dead. "Many of them weren't born when the originals made their mark."

Sometimes it works

A few remakes actually have been as good as or better than the originals. These rarities include:

His Girl Friday -- (Howard Hawks, 1940). The wildly imaginative rethinking of The Front Page is one of the all-time great screwball comedies.

The Maltese Falcon -- (John Huston, 1941). The third version of the Dashiell Hammett mystery is the stuff that hard-boiled dreams are made of.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers -- (Phil Kaufman, 1978). "They're still coming to get you!" Don Siegel's clammy classic about suspiciously vacant pod people was updated for the even more self-involved Me Generation. Remade again, much less successfully, in '94.

Heaven Can Wait -- (Warren Beatty, 1978). Beatty's remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan strikes just the right balance between satire and whimsy, and boasts a wonderful comedy ensemble.

The Fly -- (David Cronenberg, 1986). The hit from 1958 about a basement experiment that goes horribly wrong gets a full makeover, and the results are 10 times as scary.

The Ladykillers -- (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2004). As improbable as it sounds, the British comedy from 1955 about a quintet of larcenous screw-ups works just as well in the Deep South, thanks to first-rate set design and Tom Hanks as the eccentric, oddly lovable "brains" of the outfit.

Sometimes it flops

"What were they thinking!" Awful remakes include:

The Outrage -- (Martin Ritt, 1964). All that and more! Paul Newman attempts a Hispanic version of Toshiro Mifune's bandit in Rashomon.

A Star Is Born -- (Frank Pearson, 1976). Barbra Streisand in an insipid, narcissistic soft-rock remake of the backstage perennial.

King Kong -- (John Guillermin, 1976). Jessica Lange pitching woo to a giant mechanical ape that fails to perform.

Cape Fear -- (Martin Scorsese, 1991). Robert De Niro is monstrously over-the-top as ex-con Max Cady.

The Getaway -- (Roger Donaldson, 1994). What, the Sam Peckinpah original with Steve McQueen at his most charismatic wasn't exciting enough?

Psycho -- (Gus Van Sant, 1998). Tantamount to sacrilege.

Get Carter -- (Stephen Kay, 2000). Sylvester Stallone grunts his way through this ludicrous Americanization of the Cockney gangster classic with Michael Caine.