Sometime in the mid-90s, I started a hobby of trying to break into screenwriting with a series of, what I called, hack writing proposals. Not to disparage hack writing or hack writers. Everybody needs a hustle.
My first try, and by far my most successful attempt, was Peanuts, an original live action movie based on the comic strip by Charles Shultz. You might have heard of it. It was a story about a jaded and disillusioned 50 year old Charlie Brown who quits his dead end job and returns to his hometown to try to find some meaning to his life. It was inspired by a bad meta joke where Chuck would say to Linus:
“It feels like our childhood lasted forever like one of those comic strips that runs for fifty years and nothing changes, but our adulthood feels like it’s gone by like some two hour movie.”
This proposal was met with enthusiasm by the United Features rep I was able to get in touch with, but after a couple of weeks of emails with her, the idea was killed by Charles who said, as long as he was alive, he would be the only one to write Peanuts movies.
And that was that.
I already mentioned in Script Trace #2 my second attempt, my pitch to Disney for a Tron sequel. This was also a “success” in the sense that it, at least, elicited a response. My third attempt was a proposal to the BBC for a Doctor Who movie. This was long before the successful reboot of the TV series. It was right after the Americanized TV movie was broadcast in 1996, which was disastrously bad. I didn’t get any response to this.
I played around with a few other ideas, but I figured my chances were slim, and I was dead broke poor, so I had to find a more immediate hustle. Then life moved on as it usually does. Now, twenty-five years later, after a Midlife Crisis, a Great Recession, and a Pandemic, my creative writing urges are raging out of control. So I’ve decided to reengage this hobby, but this time as just a creative outlet and another way to practice plot development.
This is different enough from the Script Trace series in that I won’t be dissecting the original. When dealing with remakes, I will focus on a straight up remake, which might necessarily require some revisiting of the original but to inform the remake more than analyze its flaws.
I had already posted some hack writing ideas on Twitter. They weren’t all remakes. A couple were original IP, and some were original takes on existing IP. I won’t deal with the original IP, but I liked some of the takes on existing IP, so I might try those. I really like the idea for a Terminator: Nuclear Family animated series, though I don’t really have anything for it beyond the general concept. I have more of a premise and beginning outline for Batman Academy but my heart just isn’t into it. The Dark Night — Batman as serial killer, Joker as serial killer who kills him — just doesn’t feel like it has a market.
As usual, I will still try to elucidate the writing process — or at least my writing process — through these exercises to try to be useful to a broader audience interested in writing. I’m trying to develop my writing skills, particularly plot development, which I feel is my weakest link right now. And as with Script Trace, working with existing property is much easier than developing wholly original ideas. And hopefully, these manage to be instructive.
Here are the properties I’ve been considering:
Logan’s Run (1976)
Flash Gordon (1980)
Escape from New York (1981)
Tron (1982)
Videodrome (1983)
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)
The Last Starfighter (1984)
The Hidden (1987)
They Live (1988)
The Mask (1994)
Cube (1997)
The Game (1997)
Dark City (1998)
Constantine (2005)
The Man from Nowhere (2010)
Some of them won’t work for a variety of reasons, but enough of them have some promise to drive this series for a while. I’ve been thinking of the Logan’s Run remake since the 90s, which is probably as long as the idea has been bouncing around Hollywood. Despite this, I’m still going to work on it because I like it enough. The premise that inspired the original isn’t applicable anymore, but there is plenty else to work with to reimagine it.
Blithe Spirit was on the list, but they just remade it, and it looks good. And I had an idea to do a gender swapped remake of Romancing the Stone. And I was thinking Charlize Theron in the Michael Douglas role, and after Long Shot, Seth Rogan as the pot smoking romance novelist. But this remake is already in the works, so I won’t bother.
(And yes, I realize Tron shows up again, but I do think the IP could have done better with a remake rather than a soft reboot. But I might not touch it here since I’ve already put too much time into it and it really isn’t worth it.)
The Hidden is another favorite that I’ll likely work on. And I think Buckaroo Banzai has a lot of potential, but I have to watch the movie again to be sure. It’s been a while. They Live would be fun as hell, but nothing will ever live up to that eight hour alley brawl, just like you can never remake the hallway fight in Oldboy.
I’m sure Constantine is getting tossed around the WB/DC offices, and since it isn’t Superman or Batman, it’ll probably turn out okay. My take on it would simply be to approach it in a Noir Cosmic Horror style, but since I don’t know much of anything behind the character, I probably won’t do anything with it. Same with The Mask, I don’t know much about it beyond the movie and I’m not that into it.
The Man from Nowhere is just awesome as is, and Korean cinema has gotten a lot of play since Parasite, so my general opinion is people should just watch the original.
I have been playing around with the idea of a Grand Theft Auto adaptation. At first, I thought movie, but I’m leaning toward TV series now. It’s just so thematically and philosophically rich. I might write something up for that here, but I might not.
So that’s the plan. The goal, as the subtitle states, is to put together complete ideas, not just the beginnings of them. As they say, anybody can write a first act.