I am so out of touch with general industry news that I didn’t know that the long-simmering Travis McGee franchise had been greenlighted last year. It’s been a pet project of Leonardo DiCaprio, who had planned to star in a series of movies made from the John D. novels, but now has apparently stepped back into a producer’s role.
Which is too bad. My first thought was of Babyface Jack mangling the iconic role, but having seen him in some late movies, I started to see him as McGee without no trouble at all.
So “The Deep Blue Goodbye” is greenlighted and in preproduction, with… Christian Bale as McGee. I am way back to “meh” on this, remembering all too well the 1980 horror with that era’s can’t miss manly-man star, Sam Elliott. I just don’t see Bale bringing anything to the role but, well, Christian Bale. While DiCaprio and Bale are both too short (6 foot; McGee is famously 6’4"), at least Leo has blue eyes that could pass for McGee’s “spit colored” gray. Maybe they plan on contacts rather than letting the actor redefine the role.
Anyway, production is on indefinite hold because Bale just destroyed his ACL and can’t do anything like the physical moves needed for such a film. So all the pre and planning may go up in smoke like it has for most of the last decade’s efforts.
But there was a last-minute casting decision that made me sit up and think. The role of Meyer is a difficult one - very much second banana, very defined, very nuanced, very very easy to cast with a generic slightly-Jewish wise-ass old man. But the producers made a swing for the fences with a piece of casting that first seemed bizarre (and again, choosing someone in a white-hot phase, which often bombs):
Ha, ha, I’m going to popup-proof this - [Peter Dinklage].
At first, I said, O U Gotta B F’in Kiddin’ Me. But then it sank in… he’s the perfect actor for the role, and there’s nothing about the novel character of Meyer that wouldn’t dovetail perfectly with his, um, shortcomings.
If Leo would just step back into the main role, I could get excited about a decade of McGee films.
ETA: The problem, of course, is that Meyer doesn’t even exist for the first four novels, including DBG, and is a minor figure for two more. So they are going to be rewriting the story considerably, and I still haven’t heard whether they will stay in-period (early 1960s to start) or be updated (which would completely unravel many of the best stories). But they do have 21 novels to pick and choose among and combine and rebuild for maybe 5-6 movies total.