While I’m sure there’s always someone out there who’d want to try, there are certain historical events that would be regarded as forbidden territory for anything’s not a documentary (i.e., a movie, TV program, or play). Even if it happened hundreds of years ago, the event would still be regarded by many people as too controversial, upsetting, ugly, and depressing for it to be the subject of drama. What do you think would be off-limits?
As a subject, I can’t think of one really. The most horrible events I can think of have been dramatized and portrayed – the Holocaust, human slavery, sex crimes, murders, incest, what else? – and those portrayals are a lot more than would be necessary just to be the subject of drama. I mean, you can talk about something without portraying it.
And I predict the very next post will name something that I should have thought of.
Dramatize? Nothing. Pretty much every controversial, ugly, depressing event/phenomenon has already been dramatized. We’ve got 9/11 movies, we’ve got Holocaust movies, we’ve got movies that deal with rape, etc…
About the only thing I can think of that is unlikely to be dramatized by a Western movie studio would be a movie that treats Mohammed as a regular character and shows his face. All the Muslims would lose their shit (see the crap about the Jyllands-Posten cartoons), even if it wasn’t a movie about Mohammed.
Those are all good in this context, no?
You have your The Killing Fields, Come and See, The Last Temptation of Christ for that matter…
A Hollywood studio is going to have its own calculus for what to produce, of course, much different to that of an independent producer.
The Trump administration. I mean how could you make it any worse than what is already public? Its just one continuous cluster fuck after another and has no end in sight. A dramatization of it just wouldn’t do it justice.
That and the asshole or his surviving family would probably demand royalties. Please.
A correct historical dramatization of the Armenian genocide would be extremely problematic, because in whatever country it would be produced, this country would get into a massive diplomatic conflict with Turkey, who still deny this genocide and where it’s even illegal to mention it.
You are probably right but to my mind that is probably all the more reason to do it. A de facto ban on depicting it is not great from an educational point of view.
Same for the life of Mohammed. The fact is that death threats and violence would likely follow any major movie representation of the life of Mohammed and of early Islam. That is a great shame but makes the need to tell the story even more pressing.
It is perhaps the contrarian in me but were I a film-maker, being told there were subjects I couldn’t cover would definitely make me more interested in covering them. The fact I’m being warned off is a worthy story in and of itself.
Right–“drama” being the key word.
What about which topics can’t be turned into a comedy? Could there be a 911 comedy? A comedy about COVID-19? A comedy about the Trump administration? A comedy about a mass shooting? A comedy about the McKinley assassination? Comedy about the Great Depression, the Titanic, climate change, the Cold War, etc.? What if it’s more satirical than humorous, ect.?
Agree in principal.
The challenge is that movie-making is a business for entertainment. The fact it’s become the de facto way of teaching oral history to the masses is unfortunate.
If you can figure out how to make a profit without your sponsors’ businesses’ profits being harmed, you’ll be green-lighted. Until then, not.
Now it would be cool for somebody with “I don’t care” money like Musk or Gates (to mention two polar opposite personalities) to underwrite the project. But even they’d still need help with distribution, even if it was solely via YouTube.
I was wondering if anyone had made a movie about the Donner Party, and sure enough…
However, reviews claim it is not very historically accurate.
But since the incident is reasonably well known in popular culture, and since there’s probably a fair bit of morbid curiosity about cannibalism (they made a movie about the soccer team whose plane crashed in the Andes), there probably wouldn’t be many of the obstacles @LSLGuy cites above to making another film about it.
We’ve already had at least one:
There was the Canadian film Ararat, and Turkey was kind of waffling on it: didn’t want to censor it because they were trying to join the EU at the time, then the distributor buckled under threats anyway, but it played on TV a few years later.
Gacy: The Musical probably wouldn’t fly.*
*when the story first broke, a Chicago DJ adapted lyrics from Pink Floyd.
Hey! Gacy! Leave those kids alone
All in all, it’s just another kid in the crawl
There is absolutely nothing that can have, or should have, immunity from being a comedic target. All of the above barely cause a judder on the needle of the controversy meter.
They made one about Alferd Packer:
I think the operative factor here is time.
For example, you could have comedies about the Great Depression, McKinley assassination, Titanic, etc… because that stuff is beyond living memory.
A 9/11 comedy would go over like a lead balloon because it’s too recent and too raw for most people I think. Something like the Cold War is probably ok- it ended peacefully 30 years ago, we “won”, and there have been comedies about it already, albeit mostly darkly satirical ones like “Dr. Strangelove”.
Same basic idea about COVID, although I’d think that it is a bit riper, in that there was a lot of weird and funny about the lockdown periods that would seem to be especially fertile for comedy. Climate change… it would probably be a lot like “Don’t Look Up” if it could be done, and would likely harden attitudes on both sides of the spectrum.
You people are looking at this too limited.
Any historical event where you dramatize it in a way that is favorable to the ‘side’ that is way out of favor, considered evil etc.
I know, almost a tautology, but I thought I would mention it 
In a more in-the-theme answer I would say recent historical events which haven’t been ‘resolved’ yet so there are many passionate people all over the spectrum.
Already subjects of comedies. Great Depression, Titanic, climate change, etc.
22.3 years
Not a direct 9/11 comedy but Chris Morris (of course) did create “Four Lions” in 2010. A comedy about a group of inept Islamic suicide bombers. This was just a few short years after the very real tube and bus suicide bombings in London.
Mind you, Chris Morris is well known for exactly this sort of subject. His masterpiece "Brass Eye" involved such notable amusing subjects as Aids, Paedophilia and child murderer Myra Hindley.
If anyone were to create a 9/11 comedy he’d be a likely candidate (and I’d definitely watch it)