When in Rome (or Hollywood)... [Lex]

When movie trivia was fun this was a good one: what two films, produced in the 1960s, took a two-decade break before the sequel was made in the 1980s?

The answer: Psycho (1960) and The Hustler (1961), their sequels being Psycho II (1983) and The Color of Money (1986). It was a good trivia question because the practice of a follow up in which the actors reprised their roles, separated by two decades no less, was rare—if non existent.
How times have changed…

There have always been serial style movies (James Bond or The Thin Man franchise) and regular sequels (The Godfather II, a masterpiece; The French Connection II, pedestrian) and remakes or reimaginings (Ben Hur, The Invisible Man, Road House) and reboots (The Planet of the Apes or Halloween), but I’m not talking about those.

The focus of this post is the continuing of a tale some years later, but there’s a difference between what I mean and a straight up sequel. Sequels usually come fast and furious (yes, I meant to do that) upon the heels of the first chapter. So The Fast and The Furious or Superman or Rambo.

The characters may be the same but there is no nostalgic yearning to see what they have been up to after many years, a la Norman Bates or Eddie Felson.

Traditional sequels usually are plot-based. Ethan Hunt is assigned a new mission. Clark W. Griswold goes on his next vacation. We care less about how the characters have evolved or aged or where they find themselves than we do about them saving the day or finding a decent hotel.

Business-wise it makes perfect sense. Hollywood produces a popular film and wants to cash in on sequels, so we get Final Destination part LVIII (or whatever we are up to now) and will keep getting more as long as profit is to be had.

But somewhere along the line, in addition to the traditional sequel, we got the years-later-what-are-they-up-to film.

What changed? Why were the cases of Psycho II and The Color of Money as follow ups isolated?

As with most things that have destroyed peace and justice in the galaxy, I lay the blame at the feet of Star Wars.

The Phantom Menace (1999) is technically not a sequel (it’s a prequel!), but these terms do not matter. It was the idea of 25 years passing before we caught up with characters we yearned to know more about that captured the public’s imagination.

The Star Wars movies have all been pretty stupid, but they earned a lot of money and opened the floodgates for fan service and nostalgia films like we have not seen before.

A variant of this became the ‘what happened to so and so’ movie, and they were intriguing to say the least. There are too many to count, but some of the most notable are Top Gun: Maverick, Cobra Kai, Coming 2 America, and Bill and Ted Face the Music.

If you were a popular character in the 1980s or 1990s, you can assume, if your follow up film has not been made, it is surely being considered.
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To be honest, I don’t much like these films. It speaks to the dearth of originality in the 21st century movie business. Why take a chance on an interesting, new voice or fresh ideas when you can dust off Axel Foley? Hollywood has always been a bottom line business, but studios and large production companies used to take some chances. Even their bombs now (Snow White) are retreads.

Flops aside, the sequel/prequel/reboot/follow up movie has been immensely profitable, so, like the baseball team that finishes last but keeps its fan base, why would there be efforts at improvement if the people keep paying?

And to be even more honest: while I don’t like the practice of the follow up sequel, sometimes I can’t help but think of interesting takes on old material, and since one can’t exactly beat Hollywood, one might consider joining the party.

I’m not much involved with screenwriting any longer, but, when I was, taking a popular character or movie and picking up the saga was not a bad play to make as an aspiring scribe.

Legally, you could never proceed with that kind of story in terms of production, but, in the scriptwriting game, anything you can do to draw attention to yourself and show you have chops is something many writers consider. It’s called the ‘get noticed’ script, and you write it to land representation which will then take out your original ideas or try to find you work based on your potential.

I fell under this spell once and wrote a follow up to Caddyshack. In my telling of the sequel, which I titled Danny Noonan, the character became a professional caddie but could never land a big player’s bag so was down and out. But then he receives a message that Ty Webb has passed away and left him Bushwood (Webb was the secret owner of the club). Danny returns to Bushwood to find it in disrepair. He may have been bequeathed the club but does not have the funds to rehabilitate it. Another man does: Carl Spangler, the harelipped stoner and former Bushwood greenskeeper. Spangler became a cannabis millionaire when marijuana was legalized, and he funds the revival of Bushwood. That is until Judge Smails grandson, Spaulding (he a judge too), blocks the construction. Danny seeks out his old rival DeNunzio, who is a lawyer now, to represent him. Maggie is of course still in town and the ghosts of Webb, Czervik, and Smails get in on the act too. It was a pretty dumb story, but I had fun writing it.

I only queried one person with this, Michael O’Keefe, the actor who played Danny Noonan. He got back to me right away to say he had been making his own efforts with Warner Brothers to develop a sequel, but, surprisingly, they were not interested in any more Caddyshack movies. So it ended there, but it was an interesting exercise.

And now I invite you to give me your take on a follow up film. There is only rule: the actors who played the characters (at least most of them) must be still living. This is not a reboot or slipping in someone new to play Jack Ryan. No, this must be like Bill and Ted or Maverick or Axel Foley, the old performers still living and able to reprise their roles.

Here are two examples I have come up with…

Title: Princeton Could Use a Guy Like Joel
Logline: 40 years after that Risky Business, Joel Goodson has his own kids and a picturesque, suburban McMansion. After the “time of his life” in high school, he played it safe. But does he have it in him one more time to say, “What the fuck” and make a move?

Title: Smith & Wesson & Me
Clint Eastwood has retied from movies, but where is he? Possibly in a retirement home. And what if Inspector Harry Callahan is also similarly situated? Can ‘Dirty’ Harry adjust to this kind of lifestyle, or will he still bend the rules to infuriate his bosses and get the bad guys?

posted by Open Blogger at 07:30 PM

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