Warner Bros looking to do a prequel to 'The Shining'

It’s being reported that Warner Bros is in very early discussions about doing a prequel to the 1980 Stanley Kubrick directed version of Stephen King’s classic 1977 chiller, The Shining. The story, reportedly, will focus on prior events, before Jack Torrance and his family arrived at the Overlook Hotel. The studio has hired writer-producer Laeta Kalogridis (Shutter Island) and her partners Bradley Fischer and James Vanderbilt to craft a new take on what many call the scariest movie ever made.

The Shining is one of those films that creates a web of debate for many reasons. For long-time King fans, the novel remains a pinnacle of the authors early work. For others, it’s a bloated tale that takes way too long to get going. The same can be said of the film.

When Kubrick began working on the project, he jettisoned a lot of the metaphorical aspects of the novel; the basic frame work is there, but the rest was dropped. So what we are left with is the most basic plot: the story of a man who becomes possessed by ghosts within a summer villa in Colorado. But the themes of the story, the disintegration of the family and the dangers of alcoholism, were excised from the script.

Stephen King himself has been quoted as saying that although Kubrick made a film with memorable imagery, it was not a good adaptation of his novel and is the only adaptation of his novels that he could "remember hating.” He felt the casting of Nicholson was wrong, mostly due to the actor’s Oscar winning role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which King sensed would forever typecast him as a crazy guy. And King felt you needed a reason for Jack Torrance to do what he did, and by putting Nicholson in the film, and jettisoning all that establishing stuff from the beginning of the film, you know Jack Torrance is already probably a bit crazy from frame one. King felt you needed an everyman type of actor, one that the audience could identify with before he goes off the deep end. 

But questions remain about what Kubrick as actually adapting these days, as fans and critics alike are seeing the film in a different light. Film critic Roger Ebert, who panned the film in 1980, now concludes that: “Kubrick is telling a story with ghosts (the two girls, the former caretaker and a bartender), but it isn't a "ghost story," because the ghosts may not be present in any sense at all except as visions experienced by Jack or Danny.” Meanwhile critic James Berardinelli notes that "King would have us believe that the hotel is haunted. Kubrick is less definitive in the interpretations he offers." He dubbed the film a failure as a ghost story, but brilliant as a study of "madness and the unreliable narrator." And then there is Steve Biodrowski, a former editor of the print magazine Cinefantastique, whose review of the film is one of the few to go into detailed comparison with the novel: “Widely reviled by Stephen King fans for abandoning much of the book (King himself said his feelings balanced out to zero), Stanley Kubrick’s film version, upon re-examination, reveals that he took the same course he had often used in the past when adapting novels to the screen (such as Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita): he stripped away the back story and exposition, distilling the results down to the basic narrative line, with the characters thus rendered in a more archetypal form. The result is a brilliant, ambitious attempt to shoot a horror film without the Gothic trappings of shadows and cobwebs so often associated with the genre.

So, over the last 32 years, film critics like Ebert, seem to have changed their tune, often citing it as one the best horror films of all time, while others see it more a psychological thriller where the tricks are played more on the audience than on the film itself. 

This perception is reinforced when The Shining is viewed in tandem with the 2012 documentary Room 237, which examines the film from a different perspective, offering some clues and hidden meanings in what Kubrick was attempting to do (I was totally unaware of the spatial issues the film has, which does seem to proffer the idea that all of this could be in the mind of Jack, Wendy or Danny).

Still, King got some redemption when ABC Television remade the novel in 1997. He was able to shepherd the production, writing the screenplay (which was helmed by Mick Garris, a long-time collaborator of King’s). He got his casting of the sympathetic Jack (played by Steven Weber) and made Wendy (Rebecca De Mornay) more in keeping with the novel. 

As noted earlier, Warners is just in early discussion and has green-lighted nothing. As for Stephen King himself, the author is releasing a sequel to The Shining on January 15, 2013 which will detail the life of Danny Torrance as middle aged man haunted by his past. The tale of Doctor Sleep is about a tribe of people called The True Knot, who travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless—mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and as tween Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortals, living off the “steam” that children with the “shining” produce when they are slowly tortured to death. Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. But he finally finds himself settled in a New Hampshire town, working in the AA community that sustains him with a job at a nursing home where his remnant “shining” power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes “Doctor Sleep.” Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan’s own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra’s soul and survival.

'The Hobbit' to become three fims

Peter Jackson confirmed that he’ll turn his two-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit into three films. 

Jackson posted a letter today, confirming his reasons for the expansion:

“It is only at the end of a shoot that you finally get the chance to sit down and have a look at the film you have made. Recently Fran, Phil and I did just this when we watched for the first time an early cut of the first movie – and a large chunk of the second. We were really pleased with the way the story was coming together, in particular, the strength of the characters and the cast who have brought them to life.  All of which gave rise to a simple question: do we take this chance to tell more of the tale? And the answer from our perspective as the filmmakers, and as fans, was an unreserved ‘yes.’

We know how much of the story of Bilbo Baggins, the Wizard Gandalf, the Dwarves of Erebor, the rise of the Necromancer, and the Battle of Dol Guldur will remain untold if we do not take this chance.  The richness of the story of The Hobbit, as well as some of the related material in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, allows us to tell the full story of the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and the part he played in the sometimes dangerous, but at all times exciting, history of Middle-earth.

So, without further ado and on behalf of New Line Cinema, Warner Bros. Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Wingnut Films, and the entire cast and crew of “The Hobbit” films, I’d like to announce that two films will become three. 

It has been an unexpected journey indeed, and in the words of Professor Tolkien himself, “a tale that grew in the telling.”

While there have been some grumbles across the ‘net from fanboys and girls, this does seem logical for many reasons. While its extra payday for studios, one guesses that the actors and production crew will gain an extra paycheck as well (at least I hope). Jackson said at Comic Con that they would still need to film more footage next year, to encompass the extra 125 pages of material from the Appendices in The Return of the King.

Plus, as Jackson seems to begrudgingly admit, the estate of Tolkien was never pleased with his version of The Lord of the Rings, mostly, it seems, because of the liberties he took with the story. That included dropping characters and compressing the story and moving of certain set pieces (the spider Shelob moved from movie two to movie three). Jackson defended these changes because movies are presented in a mostly linear way. Plus, to heighten suspense, it required they be moved.

So, with that in mind, the author’s estate is holding on to other material that is not owned by MGM, New Line Cinema or Warner Bros. In particular is The Silmarillion, which started life in 1914 as a book on English mythology that would explain the origins of English history and culture. Over the next two decades he would write extensive stories and eventually submitted it to his publishers, eager to capitalize on the growing success of 1937’s The Hobbit. Rejected by the publisher for various reasons, Tolkien continued to work and revise it before devoting his time to what eventually became The Lord of the Rings. 

In the last half of The Return of the King, Tolkien added material that filled in some of the backstory of events that he chronicled in The Hobbit (there are stretches of time were Gandalf is gone, and in these Appendices, Tolkien explains where he was). So, as the story goes, Tolkien spent the rest of his life working on what would be posthumously published by his son Christopher as The Silmarillion. Contained in that book is a vast backstory of events that take place before and after The Hobbit and other material that leads eventually into The Lord of the Rings. 

So, what becomes clear is that Tolkien always intended to revise much of his Middle-earth world, but only sketched out a few notes before his passing, which is why they were released separately and never actually combined into a linear narrative. 

So with The Hobbit, Jackson was hobbled by certain material he and the studio did not have access to and would never get anyways, so they decided to take what material they did have and not waste it. So, in the end, much of what he’s trying to do makes sense. Without the estate making The Silmarillion available to the studio, the odds are we will never see another adaptation of a Tolkien work until someone in the future decides to reboot it and follow the estates wishes.

Is 'Doctor Who' facing another Gap Year in 2013?

It seems to becoming clear that Doctor Who fans will suffer another Gap Year in 2013. Of course, the BBC is promising 8 episodes of season seven in early next year, but what is the British Broadcasting Corporation planning beyond that? Current Doctor Matt Smith, in the latest issue of Doctor Who magazine, had a slip-of-the-tongue moment when he referred to Moffat's "first anniversary episode," which, by the by, Smith says is "as brilliant and as mental as you'd expect from Steven." 

First, how many are they planning? And secondly, we all know the last time they had a Gap Year for Doctor Who was just after David Tennant announced his departure as the Doctor in 2010.

Much has been rumored about 2013, which is the 50^th Anniversary of the series as a whole. The idea of doing a few specials is logical, and may support one of the other rumors that surfaced a month and half ago when former Doctor Who actor Tom Baker said he would like to be involved in a Who special.

Back in June, the actor was at the Collectormania 18 with former Doctor’s Colin Baker, Paul McGann, Peter Davison, and Sylvester McCoy when Baker was asked if he would be involved with Who for its 50^th birthday. He told the crowd: “I think if they ask me nicely or I can see what they want me to do, I'd consider it. I think the fans have been so good to me, they'd expect me to at least make an appearance." And then in early July, England’s Daily Mirror reported that a show insider confirmed Baker’s role in the upcoming special by saying he’ll will join forces with the current Eleventh Doctor to celebrate the show's half-century milestone. "It will be fitting to have Tom back to mark the 50 years. He was a big part of the show's success and is much-loved by the fans."

Grain of salt, I admit. 

Still, even Colin Baker, who was basically fired from the role, seems to have put those bad feelings beside him and seems likely to return as well. And David Tennant has already agreed to come back, with the sole hold being Christopher Eccleston who just doesn’t want to do it. Of course, how they would fit into the series current structure is unknown, as all of them have aged as natural men do over the last 20 years –something Moffat eluded to in Time Crash, the Children in Need special where Davison returned as the fifth Doctor durning Tennant’s reign –though both McCoy and Tom Baker echoed the idea that all the previous Doctor’s from the original series should play bad guys this time out. 

If this is indeed true, and 2013 is a Gap Year, I fully expect Matt Smith and showrunner Steven Moffat to announce their departures.  While Smith has told the press again and again he wants to stay “forever,” if this Gap Year happens, the eighth season (though “officially” not greenlighted yet, but “unofficially” happening) would not debut until the fall of 2014. I just can’t see Smith staying. I mean, I had already guessed he would stay at least through season eight, but if the Gap happens, expect him to announce that the specials (however many the BBC is planning) will be his final outings.

Mary Tamm -'Doctor Who's' Romana - 1950-2012

Like many people associated with Doctor Who for its nearly 49 years of existence, actors who’ve played companions to the wandering Doctor may choose depart from show, but they never fully leave it. 

Yes, fandom is sometimes difficult. Science fiction fans are loyal, adoring and sometimes over the top, but in the end, they love the character as much as they love the actor who plays them, which is why, at this time, our hearts hurt to learn of their passing. And the fact that is, in the last eighteen months, Doctor Who has lost four beloved actors who played enduring roles on the cult show in the 1970s –Nicholas Courtney, Elizabeth Sladen, Caroline John and now Mary Tamm. 

Tamm, who joined the show for season sixteen as Romanadvoratrelundar (Romana for short), passed away on July 26, after an 18 month battle with cancer. She was 62. Like Elizabeth Sladen, like Caroline John, her illness was kept secret from the press and fandom. 

When she joined the show in 1978, it was at a crossroads. After fifteen successful seasons, the series was showing its age. While Tom Baker was well settled into the role after four years, the producers were trying to figure out how make the show fresh for his fifth year. So for season sixteen, they came up with The Key to Time arc (something proposed by producer Graham Williams two years earlier). For the first time in the shows history, the entire season would be linked under an umbrella theme.

And at first, Tamm was not keen on the idea of playing a companion to the Doctor. While the 1970’s companions began to change, grow and become more three dimensional than their 1960’s counterparts, at times they still were the typical damsel in distress. But producers assured her that Romana, a fellow Time Lord, would be just as smart and capable as the Doctor. And at first, you could see they were sticking to that. But a little more than halfway through the twenty-six episode season, the writers seemed to forget who Romana was and her character began to de-evolve into the more traditional assistant role, with nothing in site to prove they had any intention of developing the character further. So as the season wound down, she decided not to return for season seventeen, though her departure was not announced until after filming had already been completed. 

But fortune favored the production team, as Lalla Ward –who played an instrumental role in the six episode season ending serial, Armageddon Factor- was asked to take over the role for the next season. According to an interview with Tamm back in 2007, she was willing to film a regeneration scene to help smooth the transition between her and (eventually) Lalla Ward, but said she was not invited to do so, and that she believed that producer John Nathan-Turner created a false rumor that she was pregnant and thus that was why she was not asked back.

 

After leaving the series, Tamm took leading roles in two BBC dramas, The Treachery Game and its sequel The Assassination Run.  A leading role in the sitcom The Hello, Goodbye Man opposite Ian Lavender was produced in 1984. She was also on the soap Brookside between 1993 and 1996, as well as many guest-star roles on various TV series.

Still, Tamm continued her association with the show through the audio plays of Big Finish, reprising Romana for the Companion Chronicle: The Stealers from Saiph in 2009. This was followed by Ferril's Folly and Tales from the Vault in 2011. She also returned as Romana in Big Finish’s second series of The Fourth Doctor Adventures featuring Tom Baker, which will now be released posthumously this January.

She is survived by her husband, Marcus Ringrose, daughter Lauren and grandson Max.

Rhys Meyers is 'Dracula'; 2 versions of 'Sleepy' coming & 'Blake's 7' to reboot

As networks and movie studios try more and more to take old brands and rework them, they’ve found it profitable to do prequels or sequels or, as the current flavor of word parsing, re-imaging. Which is what is happening with Dracula (though Universal, which will coproduce, does own Bram Stoker’s Dracula) as NBC has given a 10 episode order for a new version of the classic tale. Jonathan Rhys Meyers, late of The Tudors, will play the famed vampire as he arrives in London in hopes of wreaking havoc on the Victorian society that centuries ago “ruined his life.” However, his quest for revenge hits a snag when he falls for a woman who appears to be the second coming of his long-deceased wife (though Dark Shadows explored this 45 years ago). The script is by co-executive producer Cole Haddon. It will be executive produced by 24’s Tony Krantz, HBO films Cloin Callender and Downton Abbey producers Carnival Films & Television. It’s a co-production by Universal and the U.K.’s Sky Living. 

With The Wolverine moving quickly towards production, the role of Viper remains uncast. It was announced that Jessica Biel had been cast in the role, but talks broke down over financial issues. Then word broke that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy star Svetlana Khodchenkova would get the part. But 20^th Century Fox is seemly distancing themselves from that rumor. The movie will be filmed in Australia (as will the X Men: First Class sequel in January) and there may be an issue of going with more European actress versus an American. Or, they’re just finding a difficult role to cast. I’ll keep you posted. 

Michael Ross will adapt BZRK, the young adult novel trilogy by Michael Grant and Shadow Gang. Sony Pictures acquired the franchise last fall for producers Sam Raimi and Josh Donen. BZRK is about a team of gifted teens control biological nanobot robots warriors and they battle another group that is controlled by conjoined twins whose nanobots are brainwashing world leaders. The megalomaniacal twins are trying to take over the world. Michael Grant also co-created the popular 1990’s intermediate children series, the Animorphs. 

As Disney re-works some of the Pixar movies into 3D, they’ve decided to move –up Monsters, Inc. 3D from January 2013 to open a week before Christmas, on December 19. With the prequel movie, Monsters University, set to debut on June 21, 2013, Disney/Pixar seems to be anxious to get people motivated. Still, Disney/Pixar has the 3D converted Finding Nemo set for September, which should carry a trailer for Monsters University as well. Speaking of Finding Nemo, the studio announced that they’ve given Andrew Stanton a get out of jail free card for the massive financial write-off that was John Carter and have signed him to helm a sequel to the 2003′s fish tale that took in $867 million worldwide to become Pixar’s second-highest-grossing film and the third-biggest Disney animated film release ever.

Casting...Former Heroes actor Jack Coleman –who spent the last two seasons recurring on The Office- will join the cast of Castle…Former Lost actor Ken Leung will guest star on the season opener of another Lost alumni actor, Michael Emerson’s Person of Interest…Larry Fishburn is circling a role on NBC’s midseason drama Hannibal…Clea Duvall has landed a role on the second season of American Horror Story.

Two TV series based on Washington Irving’s classic tale of a midnight headless rider who cuts people’s heads off are making their rounds in Hollywood. First one up comes from Missing writers Grant Scharbo and Patrick Macmanus, which they’re in talks with The CW;  a series called Sleepy Hollow, which is  a modern view of  classic horror tale by making Ichabod Crane into an FBI agent who travels to the titular town to check out a beheading. The second, also called Sleepy Hollow, is from Fringe and Hawaii Five-0 producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, which landed at FOX with a pilot commitment. 

The late Terry Nation, who created the legendary Daleks for Doctor Who, also created one the most underrated science fiction series back in 1978 with Blake’s 7. Set 700 years in the future, the original four-season run followed a small group of rebels battling against the massive Terran Federation, and featured cool tech concepts and some pretty interesting themes for a low-budget sci-fi series. Much like today’s anti-heroes that populate popular shows such as Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy, Blake’s 7 was unique back in 1978. While Blake is an idealistic freedom fighter, his associates are petty crooks, smugglers and killers. The character of Avon, a technical genius who exhibits more interest in self-preservation and seeking personal wealth than wanting to help others, became the break-out character of the show. Played by Paul Darrow, Avon became the character everyone loved to hate. While Nation pitched the show to the BBC as “The Dirty Dozen” in space, most of Blake and his crew antics were more Robin Hood in origin. Now a reboot is being shopped around by Georgeville Television, with Casino Royale director Martin Campbell signed on to put the pieces together. Joe Pokaski (Heroes, CSI) has been tapped to write the pilot.

Will Jackson's The Hobbit be turned into a trilogy?

What began as a comment by Peter Jackson at Comic Con a few weeks ago now seems to have picked up steam, even after Warner Bros said their whole intention was just two films for Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit. Will the two films become three?

Jackson told Mike Fleming or at Deadline: 

“That goes back to JRR Tolkien writing The Hobbit first, for children, and only after did he develop his mythology much more over the 16 or 17 years later when The Lord of the Rings came out, which is way more epic and mythic and serious. What people have to realize is we’ve adapted The Hobbit, plus taken this additional 125 pages of notes, that’s what you’d call them. Because Tolkien himself was planning the rewrite The Hobbit after The Lord of the Rings, to make it speak to the story of The Lord of the Rings much more. In the novel, Gandalf disappears for various patches of time. In 1936, when Tolkien was writing that book, he didn’t have a clue what Gandalf was doing. But later on, when he did The Lord of the Rings and he’d hit on this whole epic story, he was going to go back and revise The Hobbit and he wrote all these notes about how Gandalf disappears and was really investigating the possible return of Sauron, the villain from The Lord of the Rings. Sauron doesn’t appear at all in The Hobbit. Tolkien was retrospectively fitting The Hobbit to embrace that mythology. He never wrote that book, but there are 125 pages of notes published at the back of Return of the King in one of the later editions. It was called The Appendices, and they are essentially his expanded Hobbit notes. So we had the rights to those as well and were allowed to use them.” Said Jackson: “We haven’t just adapted The Hobbit; we’ve adapted that book plus great chunks of his appendices and woven it all together. The movie explains where Gandalf goes; the book never does. We’ve explained it using Tolkien’s own notes. That helped inform the tone of the movie, because it allowed us to pull in material he wrote in The Lord of the Rings era and incorporate it with The Hobbit.”

Warner Bros seems now to be warming to the idea. While I know that turning a two films into three would make the bean counters happy, the logical question is (to paraphrase Jurassic Park), just because you can make three films, does not mean you should. While I’ll grant you this could be the last trip into the world of Tolkien for a long time (The Similarion remains entrenched with the Tolkien Estate and who have, at this writing, no intention of selling the rights –as Jackson pointed out, the Estate was none too pleased with his Lord of the Rings trilogy), can he take a novel he’s already stretched into two films by stretching into a third without risking the magical aspect of the series just for, what it would amount to, a larger payday for Warner Bros? 

Yes, Tolkien created a magical world, and seemed obsessed with expanding it. But do we need to see every bit he wrote, mashed with a narrative where they've already created a new character to help move the story forward? Plus, since TLOR, Jackson has shown what happens when he's given a large budget and creative control -the unnecessary remake of King Kong and the uneven The Lovely Bones. 

Still, I do trust him with the material. Then again, I would have been happy with just one film of The Hobbit.

Rigg joins 'Game'; Radcliffe grows 'Horns'; Moore takes on 'Outlander'

Jamie Campbell Bower and Lilly Collins star in The Mortal Instruments: City Of Bones, the adaptation of Cassandra Clare’s fantasy book series that Screen Gems picked up for an August 2013 release. More casting came with the announcement that Lena Headey will play Jocelyn Fray, newly Emmy-nominated Jared Harris will play Hodge Starkweather and Godfrey Gao is Magnus Bane. Robert Sheehan, Jemima West, Kevin Durand, and Robert Maillet also are aboard.

Dame Diana Rigg (one of the many aspects of the old British series The Avengers as superspy Emma Peel), who will guest star on an upcoming episode of Doctor Who, has signed on for the third season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, Olenna Tully, the “Queen of Thorns” and matriarch to the Tully clan.

It had been announced over the weekend that Jessica Biel was to be cast as Viper in 20th Century Fox’s The Wolverine. Now word has come that talks with her went awry and she’s being dropped. So some sense of regret and/or relief is in order.

Casting news on Hunger Games: Catching Fire is quickly coming together, with its mostly young main cast interacting with many veteran character actors. Philip Seymour Hoffman has already signed on, and the now Jena Malone (Johnny Darko) has been added as well as Amanda Plummer (Pulp Fiction). Monk’s Tony Shalhoub is also close to signing on as well as Snow White and the Huntsman’s Sam Claflin. I totally expect Charo to get a role as well, considering how much this franchise is turning into a variation on the Love Boat. 

Daniel Radcliffe has been cast as suspected murderer and rapist in Mandalay Pictures adaptation of the Joe Hill novel, Horns. So, coming off his turn in The Woman in Black, Radcliffe is seemingly playing against type, which is good for him. The story follows Ig Perrish (Radcliffe), who not only wakes up with a raging hangover to find out that he not only is suspected of murdering his girlfriend -but has a pair of horns growing out of his head. He discovers his new head-gear has the power to make people confess their sins and give in to their most unspeakable impulses.  Alexandre Aja will direct from an adapted screenplay by Keith Bunin. 

Just days after announcing that Chronicle director Josh Trank was going to helm 20^th Century Fox’s reboot of The Fantastic Four, they announced that they’ve hired Jeremy Slater to write the script.  Slater appears to be the latest newest wunderkind in Hollywood after his horror spec Tape 4, centering around the mythology of writer H.P. Lovecraft, got taken up at Lionsgate. He also wrote My Spy, a teen spy comedy that Universal will produce with Jake Kasdan attached to direct. The next step is: are they going to reboot it to an origin story (and really, do they need to every time a studio decides to reboot a franchise? Older ones, like James Bond and Star Trek make logical sense, but I saw no reason to do that with The Amazing Spider-Man, though it does speak volume on how Sony sees its viewing audience; dumb and unable to process that Spider-Man is being played by a new actor) or just continue on, sort of ignoring the whole Tim Story version of the four superheroes? 

Ronald D. Moore (Star Trek: The Next Generation and Battlestar Galactica) has another project on his very busy plate. Besides being attached to a Wild Wild West remake, a coast guard drama and a western series called Hangtown, he’s now involved with a TV version of Diana Gabaldon’s genre bending franchise book series Outlander. Her novels kinda defies classification, as she takes many genres and smashes them together, though at its heart, Outlander is a historical romance series with some science fiction elements (time travel) and high adventure where men beat each other up. Gabaldon’s three science degrees come in handy when she describes everything that happens in minute detail. It’s like George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, only less interesting. Just as long, I will add, but nowhere near as beautifully told.