Neglecting the god-awful, 60’s crapfest that was the movie, how would you do a sequel to the novel?
I wouldn’t. Why would you want to?
That story was complete, there’s no room for a sequel with the same characters. MAYBE there could be a sequel with another experimental patient, one of normal or even above average intelligence at the beginning. That might be interesting, but I don’t think that it would live up to the dramatic, tragic success of the first story.
I’d have him drooling into his pudding for two hours. Not the most compelling script but I could bring it in for slightly under $100 million.
You mean that god-awful 60’s [url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062794/]crapfest** that won Cliff Robertson a very deserved Oscar? Do you think that the musical “Flowers for Algernon” starring Michael Crawford was also a crapfest?
Corrected link.
I wonder what brought up this line of thinking. If there’s anything that’s complete entirely had has no need and no room for a sequel, it’s that.
SPOILER ALERT!!!
The sequel would have to a horror fantasy slash fest. After the regression back to moronity, the next effect takes even longer to manifest. But it causes an insatiable hunger for the blood of high school teeners (played by 25 yr olds) who dress oddly but have plenty of nicely jiggelly parts. The end result would gigantism followed by exploding heads.
Fun for everyone.
I’d have Algernon turn out to be merely one of several ‘split personalities’ in somebody’s mind and that his real name was actually Billy Milligan.
For a truly crappy Flowers for Algernon movie, watch Molly starring Elisabeth Shue. I don’t know if they even credit Daniel Keyes for the story, but Molly is a blatant rip-off. Maybe he refused to let them use his name.
Maybe they could combine this with Stuart Little 4. Stuart is tooling around in his nifty little roadster, and he picks up Algernon, who is hitchhiking to get the hell away from that freaky neuro lab. Unfortunately, the neuro lab goons have implanted a locator chip in Algernon, and both Algy and Stuart end up being vivisected by Cliff Robertson in a special-ed science fair project.
seqol progris report
Miss Kinnian said I shuld rite a seqol to Flours For Algeron, and she says i rite as gud as any skreenriter in Holywood i hop the fellas at Donners dont say you shore puld a charlie gordon wen i tun in my skript they say i mite gets points off the films gross butt my agent is holden out for an even beter deel for futur seqols parris hiltun mite play miss kinnian and been aflec wil be me charlie gordon
Wel i gotta go do lunch baby and my agent is texing me on my salephone
Chow
yrs truly charlie gordon
For a good ‘Flowers for Algernon’ style story, how about Phenomenon?
*Charly * is not a great movie, but it’s hardly a crapfest.
Or wait; am I mixing up the title with the source material? Must remember to IMDB first.
If Cliff Robertson’s Oscar isn’t the least deserving ever in the Best Actor category, it certainly comes close. He’s fine as Charly but becomes increasingly unconvincing as he gets smarter, and has zero chemsitry with Claire Bloom as he “advances” as well. But the absolute worst part, the part that makes the Oscar so undeserving is that the movie cheats us out of seeing Charly devolve! In Flowers, it is heartbreaking to see Charly’s faculties slowly erode, with his keen self-awareness of the process and his inability to do anything about it. But the movie jumps over that entire process with a single cut: one second, he’s a genius contemplating the process he’s about to face, and then the very next second, he’s original Charly swinging on the swing set, back to “normal”. At least in Awakenings, we got to see Robert DeNiro waste back away, and if Cliff Robertson had shown 20 minutes of that, I wouldn’t have agreed with the Oscar–over Peter O’Toole in The Lion in Winter!–but I would’ve understood. But what’s unquestionably the heaviest lifting part of the role, the money scenes (from both a technical aspect and a button-pushing emotional point of view) are completely cut. No way did Robertson deserve that Oscar.
Well, y’know, with great Flowers comes great unoriginality…
Robertson’s Oscar was highly controversial, with observers decrying his shamelessly heavy-handed arm twisting-PR campaign. I’m certainly no expert on this matter, but I’ve heard several authorities say Robertson’s naked grab was really, really over the top, especially given his uneven delivery.
That said, I enjoyed the movie, though it lost many opportunities.
It’s tough to say since Charly wasn’t a big film, so one person’s “shamelessly heavy-handed campaign” is another person’s “effort to get his small film seen”, and while he was, from all accounts, everywhere drumming up support, it never got as bad as, say, Chill Wills’ embarrassing ad campaigns for The Alamo a few years earlier.
It’s also tough to determine how much of that attitude is historical revisionism, since Robertson was persona non grata for a while in the industry for blowing the whistle on the Columbia check-cashing scandal. And it certainly doesn’t help that the film dates quite badly now, with weird counter-culture episodes and genuinely goofy uses of splitscreens.
Still, it appears that O’Toole, who’s 0-for-7 with the Academy (not counting his Life Achievement Award) may have a good shot of winning the real deal this year. No actor has received as many Lead nominations and not won a competitive Oscar, so that’s why his loss for Lion (probably his best shot post-Lawrence) seems so egregious in retrospect.