TALK SHOW
Hosted by Jaime Clarke

Topic: Movie Remake

Guests:

Steve Almond is the author of five books, most recently the essay collection (Not That You Asked), excerpts of which are available at www.candyfreak.com.

Emily Franklin is the author of Liner Notes and The Girls' Almanac as well as the critically-acclaimed seven-book fiction series for teens, The Principles of Love. Forthcoming from Delacorte/Knopf is a Young Adult novel, The Other Half of Me, and another series from Penguin. She edited the anthology It’s a Wonderful Lie: 26 Truths about Life in Your Twenties and the forthcoming How to Spell Chanukah: 18 Writers on 8 Nights of Lights. She is co-editor of Before: Short Stories about Pregnancy from Our Top Writers. More about Emily at www.emilyfranklin.com.

Lydia Millet’s most recent book is Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. She is the author of several previous novels, including Everyone's Pretty and My Happy Life, which won the 2003 PEN Center USA Award for Fiction. She lives in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona.

Neal Pollack is the author of the somewhat ballyhooed memoir Alternadad, and also several books of satirical fiction, including The Neal Pollack Anthology Of American Literature and the rock-n-roll novel Never Mind The Pollacks. He's the founder of www.offsprung.com, a humor web site for parents. He lives in Los Angeles, with his family.


—name a movie you’d remake.

SA: Fatal Attraction.

EF: I'm torn here. Part of me says remake a personal favorite: The Philadelphia Story with George Clooney as CK Dexter Haven and Kate Winslet as Tracy Lord (not the porno girl, the Katherine Hepburn role). Parker Posey would be the female reporter with one of the bright young males out there (Jake G., Tobey M, etc.) in the dorky but endearing Jimmy Stewart role. Abigail Breslin as the precocious Dinah Lord. HOWEVER... why mess with a great thing? I can't make it better. So why not pick something hiding from current audiences. Something like Little Darlings—the teen camp romp with heart.

LM: No remake in the world could be as good as making an original feature out of Karl Capek's visionary book, War With the Newts, a hilarious and poignant '20s sci-fi allegory about the discovery of a race of giant newts that eventually takes over the world.

NP: There's this comedy called The Farmer's Daughter from the 1940s, starring Loretta Young and Joseph Cotten. It's about a Swedish farm girl who heads to the big city to go to nursing school, but gets robbed and ends up being the housekeeper to a congressman. Anyway, it turns into a big political parable and she winds up going to Congress because she's so straight-talking and sensible and the politicians are all so corrupt. I'd like to see this get remade today, maybe as a Mexican-American comedy. The themes are still relevant.