WTF?!

Updated on February 24, 2010 By Ken Begg 22 Comments

Word has it that Shane Black–SHANE BLACK–will be writing and directing (!) a new Doc Savage film.  All of the sudden that George Pal movie is looking a lot better.

I look forward to Doc and the crew dropping the f and c and s and whatever bombs constantly, as well as the requisite sleazy sex stuff.  Fantastic choice, Columbia Pictures.

Oh, the closest thing Black wrote to Doc Savage in tone was The Last Action Hero.  Yeah, that was terrific.  I couldn’t be more excited.

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  • JoshG

    For some reason I thought Sam Raimi would be doing the Doc Savage movie.

  • Heli

    According to IMDB, he also wrote The Monster Squad, so it’s not like it’s impossible for him to write a non-profanity-laced script.

  • However, he was not the only writer on MONSTER SQUAD. Fred Dekker is also credited. Since Dekker did HOUSE and NIGHT OF THE CREEPS. I am suspicious that he was responsible for those aspects of MONSTER SQUAD that match up to those other films (i.e., all of them).

  • I’m pretty sure Black contributed the HI-larious bit where they kicked Wolfman in the crotch, though. It just seems like his sort of gag. Also the thing about the five year old girl being the ceremonial virgin.

  • Heli

    I stand corrected. The name wasn’t familiar to me (thankfully?), so I looked him up and was surprised to see a genre semi-classic listed.

  • BeckoningChasm

    I confess: I really, really like Last Action Hero. But there were (at least) three other writers on that one.

  • Last Action Hero wasn’t an unmitigated disaster (except at the box office), but I will say that your view is a minority one. Not that that makes it invalid; you like what you like. Most people didn’t though. For myself, I remember it feeling too long and too big. So it was definitely a forerunner to nearly every movie made today.

  • Foywonder

    Shane Black didn’t write Last Action Hero. He rewrote Last Action Hero with two other writers. The original screenwriters only get a story credit. I’ve heard for years about how the first draft that got the film greenlit was a smaller, smarter film, but after Arnold signed on new writers were brought in for a page-one rewrite to transform it into a mega-sized blockbuster.

  • Man, they sure know their business in Hollywood. Thanks for the info, Scott.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Well, notice I said I liked LAH. I didn’t say it was a masterpiece or even a good movie. Subjectivity isn’t fact-based.

  • Crispy

    Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was written/directed by Black and that was pretty good so there’s probably hope?

  • It’s not so much that Black can’t make a good movie (although personally I loath most of his stuff), but that his sensibility strikes me as completely inappropriate for a Doc Savage film. I mean, he could surprise me…but I doubt it.

  • There’s the subtext between Doc and his cousin Pat. They could totally ruin the movie that way if they wanted to. Mind you, there are plenty of other ways to ruin it.

    BTW, I really liked the George Pal version, back when I was 14.

  • Blackadder

    I am a huge fan of the pulps, and I don’t think they translate well to film.

    This project is highly unlikely to change my mind. It probably won’t even be a period piece, and setting a pulp story outside of the proper time period is a travesty.

  • Yes, a Doc Savage movie set outside the ’30s would be incredibly pointless.

    Hey, you know, it will be the ’30s again in just twenty years. Weird.

  • PB210

    http://thefedorachronicles.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=1688&hilit=warshawski&start=30

    http://monsterkidclassichorrorforum.yuku.com/topic/14296/master/1/?page=3

    omebody on Yuku posted a thread about period piece adventure films. They noted that after the last 1980’s Indiana Jones film, film versions of Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer, The Shadow, and the original (i.e. not adapted from an antecedent property) Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow followed without producing sequels. However, I pointed out that the Mummy films with Brendan Frasier reached part three recently, and they take place decades in the past.

    More surprisingly, Robert Downey, Jr.’s recent Sherlock Holmes actually did well enough to merit an announced sequel despite taking place in the Victorian Era as period piece. Why did I say “more surprisingly”? Well, the last Sherlock Holmes film to reach American theaters came out over twenty years previously! In fact, after Basil Rathbone made his last Universal Holmes film in 1946, no person managed to reprise the role of Holmes in any theatrical film. Yes, 1946 to 2010, nobody returned to the role of Sherlock Holmes in a film.

    The upcoming The First Avenger: Captain America will at least partially take place during World War II.

    http://www.iesb.net/index.php?option=co … &Itemid=73
    Apparently a script for another version of the Shadow has emerged. While I do not feel sure that this will appear as a period piece, I get a sense that it will, albeit the initial script seems to follow a hard R-rated approach.

  • Luke Blanchard

    I like Last Action Hero. Love the Hamlet bit.

    Commercially, I would guess its problem was it fell between too stools. In some ways it’s like a family film, but it’s also quite violent.

  • bt

    Wasn’t there a Sherlock Holmes movie with Nicol Williamson that came out in the 70’s? I’m thinking it was a movie that showed Watson was really the brains of the operation. Or am I imagining that?

  • jason hyde

    The Sherlock Holmes film with Nicol Williamson was The Seven Percent Solution. Based on Nicholas Meyer’s book in which Watson and Mycroft trick Holmes into going to Vienna to undergo treatment for his cocaine addiction from none other than Sigmund Freud, who was played by Alan Arkin. The book’s better, but the movie’s worth catching for Robert Duvall’s very sketchy British accent as Watson.

  • You’re thinking of the Seven-Percent Solution, an adaptation of the Nicholas Meyer book in which Watson tricks a drug-addled Holmes into traveling to Vienna so that he may be tended to by Sigmund Freud. It’s probably the best of the many, many Holmes pastiches.

    Watson isn’t the brains of the pair, though. You may be conflating this with the comedy Without a Clue, where Dr. Watson (Ben Kingsley) is the real amateur detective, but must hire the bumbling Michael Caine to impersonate his fictional ‘friend’ Holmes.

  • BT

    Ken you are right. I was conflating the two. I was remembering Michael Caine in something to do with Holmes, and thought he may have been in the williamson film.

    Man I’m getting old.

  • Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.