There is the 1981 movie “Neighbors” with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd playing against type. Belushi plays the meek neighbor and Aykroyd plays the psychotic new neighbor. They decided before filming to both play against type, with predictable results.
I’m thinking that something similar may have happened in “Tiptoes.” Oldman and Dinklage may have gotten drunk and decided to switch roles.
Seriously. Compared to the plot of Monster’s Ball how could this not have been done? Barry was no sure thing draw at that point, she had Catwoman to live down if nothing else, but as producer I’m sure she ponied up some of the cost. And likely wanted to reestablish her serious movie acting cred. Bad choice in Sax as director but consensus was that she delivered on her performance.
Easy to look at bad movies and in hindsight wonder what they were thinking. Which is why we see more boring safe things done.
Then again someone listened to a pitch for a show about a drug addled woman with a problematic childhood who, get this, is a chess wunderkind (!) boy that will make for exciting tv, c’mon … and not only said sure but threw lots of production money at it. So good thing some ideas that sound wtf get someone saying do it.
This sounds fucking awesome.
Two “how on earth did these pitches ever get accepted” films that turned out to be quite good:
The Lobster: In the future, all single people are forced to stay at a hotel, where they have 45 days to find a romantic partner or else be transformed into an animal of their choosing and released into the wild.
Being John Malkovitch: An unemployed puppeteer discovers a tunnel that leads into the mind of real-life actor John Malkovitch, allowing one to occupy his body for a short time before being ejected into a ditch by the New Jersey Turnpike.
Rubber: A sentient tire rises from the junkyard and goes on a murder spree, making heads explode at will. Next stop: Hollywood. There, I just saved you wasting 90 minutes of your life.
Unfortunately, it isn’t.
Two great examples!
The elevator pitch for Swiss Army Man:
“Okay, so our hero is a castaway on a tropical island. And he goes through all the usual survival stuff. But here’s the twist - a dead body washes up on the beach and becomes his imaginary best friend.”
“Are you insane?”
“Daniel Radcliffe has agreed to play the corpse.”
“Okay, we’ll greenlight it.”
I have no entry, but I just have to say this thread is proving to be a goldmine of movies to see over the New Year and beyond. I detest films with ho hum, cliched scripts, and these are an antidote to that. I’ve seen some already for proof of that.
John Mulaney’s Back to the Future bit applies.
One notable exception is 1945’s Picture of Dorian Gray, where they actually commissioned a Great Artist, Ivan Albright, to paint the after portrait. The original hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago.
My go-to movie of this sort is Southland Tales. Here is an earlier thread on it: holy crap, "Southland Tales". I will note that lissener in that thread said
It’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, but I just couldn’t look away.
Which sums it up pretty well. My ranking for this film, on a scale from 1 to 10, is mauve or maybe plaid.
On a scale of one to ten, Southland Tales is minus potato
Yeah, but. The guy who wrote the novel, Walter Tevis, wrote only five other novels but three of them were The Hustler, The Color of Money, and The Man Who Fell to Earth. It may not have been as hard as you think to find someone to bankroll a movie with a woman as hero from this guy.
In fact, I’d put down money to get one of his unmade novels that I’ve never read into production.
The Steps of the Sun is a 1983 science fiction novel by the American author Walter Tevis.[1] It is about a future energy crisis, and a world in which China has become the leading superpower.
More timely now than it was in 1983.
Isn’t every movie Dallesandro was in pretty much an excuse to get naked?
I thought it was interesting that the shots of the portrait of Dorian Gray were in color, while the rest of the film was in B&W, a fact I appreciated only recently. I first saw the movie as a young teen, on the B&W TV my mother insisted we have at home, because she thought color TVs gave you cancer (she had probably read something once about early experiments in color broadcast using red uranium, but no TV was ever manufactured with anything radioactive).
I didn’t see the film again until very recently, and finally was aware of the shots of the portrait being in color.
It could be argued that:
begat:
My tastes are fairly mainstream, but I enjoyed Rubber (although the fact that we started watching it at 1:30 A.M. may have had something to do with that). And I’ve watched Monkeybone several times — one of my favorite movies.
Well, there you go.
I saw this space truckers, years ago, it was awesome, yeah, a dumb movie, but still fun to watch.
Square pigs 