Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 28, 1993 TAG: 9302260307
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Tom Shales
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
IT'S TROUBLE WHEN FILM IMITATES TV
Every now and then people like to get away from television and go to the movies. That's going to get harder and harder to do. The big creative inspiration now sweeping Hollywood is to make feature films based on old TV shows.You'll go to the movies and TV will be there waiting for you.
The trend was accelerated by the box-office success of "The Addams Family" and "Wayne's World," the former based on a TV series of the '60s (that was in turn based on cartoons by Charles Addams), the latter derived from sketches on "Saturday Night Live."
Naturally - if anything can be described as happening "naturally" out here - sequels to both "Addams" and "World" are in the works.
"Wayne's World 2" has reportedly been delayed by the ego trips of star Mike Myers, who created the characters of Wayne and Garth, those two Aurora, Ill., home boys who supposedly do a wacky cable-access show from their basement. Suffice it to say, they are moving upstairs. After many a script rewrite, the "WW II" is apparently ready to shoot.
But these two pictures are only part of the desperate mad rush to television. At Paramount, where "Wayne's World" was made, "SNL" executive producer Lorne Michaels is now watching over the filming of "Coneheads," a film based on yet another "SNL" sketch, one from years gone by. Remember the family with the egg-like noggins who came to suburbia from outer space and told everybody they were from "France"? Prepare to meet them again.
At Walt Disney Studios, a new movie version of the long-long-long-running CBS crime series "Hawaii 5-0" is now in preparation. At Universal, John Goodman of "Roseanne" will star as Fred in a new big-screen version of the old small-screen cartoon series "The Flintstones," about that zany stone-age family.
"The Fugitive," a video-noir chase melodrama that had a long run on ABC years ago and is now enjoying a rebirth (via reruns) on cable's Arts & Entertainment Network, is also being turned into a film. Filming has already begun at Warner Bros., with Harrison Ford inheriting the role originated by David Janssen.
Also in the planning stages: "The Brady Bunch Movie," derived from the cheerfully idiotic family sitcom that refuses to die; a feature-length treatment of, yes, "Gilligan's Island"; and "The Beverly Hillbillies," with Jim Varney and Cloris Leachman taking over the parts of Jed and Granny played originally by Buddy Ebsen and Irene Ryan.
At this rate, no old TV show, hit or flop, is safe. We can perhaps Particularly attractive to producers are really dumb shows with easily exploitable gimmicks. expect movie versions of everything from "My Mother, The Car" to "I'm Dickens, He's Fenster" to the infamous "Supertrain." Particularly attractive to producers are really dumb shows with easily exploitable gimmicks. If there's anything television has never had a shortage of, it's shows like that.
Why is it happening? In movies and in television, any success breeds armies of clones. But in past years, TV shows were usually based on movies, rather than the other way around. Studio executives looked down on television as an inferior relation, like the "crazy aunt" that Ross Perot is always talking about. Now, many of the studios are headed by people who grew up on TV, and they speak television more fluently than they speak cinema.
And they also know that baby boomers, still the biggest generation America has produced, love getting nostalgic about inane TV shows that they watched when they were growing up. When the preview trailer for "The Addams Family" started making the theater rounds months before the picture was finished, audiences immediately recognized the "click-click" theme music from the TV show and, apparently, little warm spots lit up in their hearts.
By the time the picture arrived, it didn't matter that it was really pretty lame; people were wild to see it, partly so they could get another chance at reliving youth.
You might think studio executives would feel a little chagrined at borrowing so much from television, lowly medium of the common person. But here in the town of having no shame, expediency has always taken precedence over pride. Unholy alliances are tolerated so long as they generate profits.
Thus could that stupid TV show you try to avoid today become the stupid movie you fork over seven bucks to see tomorrow.
Washington Post Writers Group
Tom Shales writes about television for The Washington Post.