A Very Important Post about… a movie that’s dying to be remade

Over at Entertainment Weekly, Mark Harris bemoans the timidity of Hollywood’s recession offerings  Many of us are gritting our teeth and counting our dimes through this rough recession, but the studios and networks have discovered a silver lining — they don’t have to try anymore. In entertainment, we have met the first casualty of the ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Over at Entertainment Weekly, Mark Harris bemoans the timidity of Hollywood’s recession offerings

 Many of us are gritting our teeth and counting our dimes through this rough recession, but the studios and networks have discovered a silver lining — they don’t have to try anymore. In entertainment, we have met the first casualty of the economic collapse: ambition….

There will always be an audience for mindless crap, but not only for mindless crap. Executives who insist that all we want is comfort food because that’s all they know how to cook are missing our appetite for variety, for surprise, for something we’ve never seen. And in underestimating our intelligence, they overestimate their own.  

Here’s a suggestion for Hollywood.  It’s not even that radical a suggestion, because the source material has already been filmed.

Why not remake The Bonfire of the Vanities

This is a no-lose proposition.  The Tom Wolfe novel was a heady cocktail of personal hubris set in the financial, political and media world of 1980’s New York.  It’s the perfect lens through which one can dissect our current financial travails.  Plus, the original movie version was such a God-awful bomb that the most memorable thing about it was a book chronicling the disaster.  The remake, much like Ocean’s Eleven, is bound to improve on the original. 

Hell, if even Tom Friedman is dropping references to Wolfe’s novel in his columns, one would hope a movie mogul or two has figured out the zeitgeist enough to greenlight a remake.

Here, I’ll give my Left Coast friends one last nudge — some helpful casting suggestions:

  • Sherman McCoy — Aaron Eckhart
  • Peter Fallow — Hugh Laurie
  • Maria Ruskin — Scarlett Johansson
  • Judy McCoy — Calista Flockhart
  • Reginald Bacon — Jeffrey Wright
  • Larry Kramer — Jake Gyllenhaal

That’s a talented, inexpensive cast right there!  C’mon, Hollywood, if you’re making a movie version of Moneyball, then surely you could do the same for either Liar’s Poker or Tom Wolfe’s fictional equivalent.  Get on it!

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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