If you were suddenly contacted by a major studio and given a $100 million budget (or you’re a rich bastard, and you decide to spend $100 million to have a movie made), you could cast anyone (living, obviously) and could do anything you like with your budget, what would you make (or have made)?
I’d make a black and white, silent version of O Henry’s Gift Of The Magi with no intertitles, starring Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor, shot entirely from Steadicam and helicopter.
Hmm… Well, I’ve just finished reading The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah and it’s still pretty fresh in my mind, so I think I’d like to have The Dark Tower made into, well, something. It’s too long to fit into one movie and… Actually, come to think of it, $100 million wouldn’t be nearly enough…
I’d like to see Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories filmed. I mean, I love Cabaret, but it (and the play it’s based on, I Am a Camera) differs significantly from the original stories. While that’s completely forgivable in this instance, it would still be nice to see the original stories in some kind of filmed format (I think an HBO miniseries would be nice).
There’s also a funny novel by Robert Rodi called What They Did to Princess Paragon that I think would make a great movie.
I’d love to do an on screen adaptation of Harry Tourtledove’s American Empire series. I don’t know who’d I cast, but I’ve always wanted to see a movie where the South was victorious.
Buckaroo Banzai vs. The World Crime League.
It’s the sequel that was promised at the end of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, one of my favorite movies.
Trite, yes. But I would make Catcher in the Rye.
Eve, I think you’d need more than $100 mil, but I’ll be your steadicam operator. (provided you pay for the steadicam and my training) 
My first choice would be an historical drama about Manfred von Richthofen. It would be called Richthofen. It would be beautiful, with reproductions of the actual aircraft flying over the verdant fields of early-20th Century Europe. It would be horrifying, with mud and blood and guts. It would be informative, being the story of WWI’s leading ace. But mostly, I just want to see an historically accurate film with lots of WWI airplanes flying in it; and shot with modern equipment and modern filmmaking techniques (except CGI).
I’d also like to make a period-piece of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.
ooOooo, lots of things would be nice…
A Bond novel, without all the technocrap that is included…say Casino Royale as a period piece, black and white very noir. I think James Purfew as Bond, not sure who else for the cast.
Something by Lovecraft, dead accurate to the writing, in the sort of realistic style of the new version of Haunting of Hell House [really detailed sets, where the buildings and chachkas are dead on to the period the piece is set in, down to the costuming and hairstyles] Not certain which story I would like seen done=)
I would love to see the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series done as a 5 year tv series, but done for like Cinemax due to seriously adult themes. AND follow the books not just sort of ‘wing it’ like too many adaptations are done. More like Babylon 5 where JMS had a specific story arc and followed it.
They did do a version of Casino Royale in B&W in 1954. Barry Nelson as Bond, Peter Lorre as La Chiffre.
I hit “submit reply” too soon. I think a new version of Casino Royale done as a period peice would be good; although I’d shoot it in colour. I found the Climax! version to be rather poorly acted (it was live television), and the 1967 comedy version was… well, it was a comedy. The 1954 version was closer to the book, but obviously they could not include some of the more graphic elements.
You’d probably need a lot more than $100 million to do this one properly… a sprawling, epic treatment of the history of America’s struggle (spearheaded by Thomas Jefferson in particular) against the Barbary Pirates, 1783-1815 – hostilities which culminated in the U.S.A.'s first war against an unconventional enemy. (What follows is my summary of this page.)
The Barbary Pirates were state-supported terrorists (acting on behalf of the pashas and deys of Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, and Morocco) who regularly seized European ships and crews with impunity, demanding and receiving heavy ransom payments and annual tributes. [The movie would have to explain that in America’s colonial period, we were largely spared these attacks because Great Britain (and later, France) were paying off the Pirates on our behalf.]
Following Independence, however, the pirates began attacking U.S. merchant marine vessels with gusto. Thomas Jefferson, then a government minister under Washington, abandoned his “coastal defense” vision of the U.S. Navy in favor of a more beefed-up, international-waters capable force that could take the war to the pirates’ home waters off the N. African coast, but he wouldn’t become president until 1801. In the 1780’s, Ministers Jefferson, John Adams, and others attempted to piece together an international coalition with Europe to take on the pirates, but these diplomatic attempts failed due to the realpolitik (cheaper to make payoffs than to wage a war) preferred by Great Britain and France (although most of the Mediterranean and Scandinavian states were in favor of it).
The fledgling republic, thus hampered by a weak navy and stymied by diplomatic failure, was compelled to pay escalating ransoms throughout the 1780’s and '90’s. (In 1795, the U.S. paid the dey of Algiers a ransom package valued at almost $1 million to ransom a single ship’s crew; contrast that sum with the $15 million President Jefferson would pay later to purchase the Louisiana Territory, thus doubling America’s size.)
It wasn’t until 1801 that the U.S. made it a policy to stop paying tribute, in a decision made by President Thomas Jefferson. As incredible as it seems to us now, the pasha of Tripoli immediately declared war on the United States. What follows is four year’s worth of naval warfare curtailed by the flawed treaty of 1805 (which stipulated a final ransom payment) and a second war against Algiers, culminating in the definitive treaty of 1815 ending all tribute payments by the U.S. to all the Barbary Pirate states.
The Great Powers of Europe weren’t able to accomplish the same on their own behalfs until the 1830’s.
The Good Omens movie. Definitely. With the kraken getting extra scenes. Terry Gilliam to direct, Judi Dench as Agnes Nutter, John Cleese as Shadwell, Kirsten Dunst as War, Charles Dance as Famine.
I just popped in the 1954 version of Casino Royale Barry Nelson (Bond) just told a woman he was just teaching Leiter how to play baccarat. He pronounced it “back-a-rat”. Ow, my ears!
I just re-read that a couple of days ago. I’d definitely like to see that one on film.
I’d hire the writers from Batman: The Animated Series to make a Batman movie based on a story instead based on big name stars and special effects.
My second choice would be to follow up the story of Crash Davis from Bull Durham . I can’t recall any movie that looks at baseball from the team manager’s perspective and think the story of a bush league manager who got hired by the majors would be interesting. Kevin Costner has to do something to rehabilitate his reputation and reprising this character would be his best route for doing so, and as a result I’m hoping I can hire him cheap.
I’d like to make a Dark Tower movie series. I figure it’ll run $200-250 million a pop, though, since the movies would have to run about 4-5 hours each. Anybody got a couple of billion dollars lying around?
I’d also like to turn ELO’s 1981 underrated album Time into a completely animated feature with a different style for each song.
Just for laughs, I’d remake one of Irwin Allen’s 70’s disaster flicks with an all-star cast of actors I don’t like just to kill them all off one by one.
've mentioned before that I’d like to see William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic made according to the original story, instead of the hacked-up version that came out in 1995. The story is so cinematic it could go straight to the screenplay.
In a similar vein, Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade was made into a very stupid comedy instead of the great adventure story it really is. That seriously needs a serious remake! (For those who don’t know the plot, Sir Roger, the minor knight in charge of an English village, is preparing to go off to the Crusades when a spaceship lands at the edge of town. A “blue-skinned demon” steps out with his ray gun and burns a peasant. The local troop of archers nails him, the villagers capture the ship (the aliens have forgotten the kind of nasty hand-to-hand fighting the medieval English were very good at), and Sir Roger decides to take the ship off to Jerusalem. It doesn’t quite work.)
Just about any of Robert Heinlein’s juveniles.
Have Space Suit Will Travel
Starman Jones
Podkayne of Mars
Space Cadet
Red Planet
Any of those would have great visuals (especially the first with it’s image of the Milky Way from the Lesser Megellanic Cloud) and young heroes/heroines who could grab the attention of young and old. It’s a mystery to me why Heinlein’s early works have been neglected for the screen.
Failing that I’d like to see H Beam Piper’s Fuzzy Novels made into movies. Those would work well and might let us put the ewoks behind us finally.
The Heinlein juviniles would be excellent movies, if done by someone who actually likes the stories. Glory Road would be good as well…
Joseph Heller’s God Knows, with whichever survivors of the epics are able to play the old David & Bathsheba (dreamcast: Charlton Heston & Elizabeth Taylor) with younger stars to play the young characters (dreamcast: Brendan Fraser & Charlize Theron).
Confederacy of Dunces- DON’T MENTION DREW BARRYMORE’S VERSION, PLEASE— but with Philip Seymour Hoffman or Oliver Platt to play the lead.
Historical pics based on Thermopylae, the Platonic dialogues, Herod the Great, Stephen Decatur’s adventures in Lebanon, Chang/Eng Bunker, the bar Kokhba Revolt, & Gore Vidal’s Burr.
I’d love to see this, but I don’t think the book is filmable.
I’m not sure if $100 million is enough, but…
I’d like to do Dune justice. The David Lynch version is an abomination (though, admittedly, a clever abomination)…the SciFi miniseries was simply boring, which I found really kind of sad. I think it’s possible to make Dune both intriguing, engrossing, exciting, and avoid silly hats. But that’s just me.
Also, it’s too soon, and maybe too late forever, but while Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings was arguably very entertaining cinema, Tolkien’s TLotR it just wasn’t, plain and simple. I think it would be possible to compress the backstory, stay faithful to the “rules” of Middle Earth, preserve the original characterizations, allow a little more exposition, and still make a very entertaining, exciting, moving, and thoroughly engrossing set of films.
On a completely different tack, I’d like to see a version of Puline Melville’s “The Ventroliquist’s Tale” made into a film. It would have to get an X rating, as the story’s graphic eroticism is absolutely essential, but it’s a film worth making, and would set toungues wagging (if done right) for years.