Oh jeez. One time, when I was in college (that's right, COLLEGE) I went to see John Waters talk about his career and answer audience questions. At one point, someone asked him a question about Edith Massey, who played Edie in Pink Flamingos. John Waters said that when you rode in the car with Massey, she would provide a manic, uninterrupted commentary of everything that she saw. "Blue car fire hydrant yellow house big dog wool skirt red car red car white car oak tree pretty bird white house." I feel like Hollywood is like that now, except every time they see something, they make it into a movie. How else to explain thinking that you could possibly pull a compelling and meaningful narrative out of a fucking VIEW-MASTER?
From the HollywoodReporter:
Remember View-Master, the Fisher-Price toy with those little 3D picture discs of mountains, rivers and caverns that you could rotate through a viewfinder? Well, DreamWorks is in negotiations to acquire movie rights to the toy from Mattel (which owns Fisher-Price) and has asked Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci to do some "Transformers"-style magic on it.
Story specifics are being kept under wraps, though Kane, who tweeted his involvement during the holiday weekend, said, "It'll be like the old '80s Amblin movies: 'Goonies,' 'Young Sherlock' ... in that vein." That post has been taken down. Amblin-style movies has been the modus operandi of the Kurtzman-Orci banner.
DreamWorks is hoping to make a family-friendly movie.
That last sentence is my favorite. "Dreamworks is hoping to make an NC-17 fuckfest."
The thing is, the View-Master is just a plastic stereo-opticon for children. That's like making a movie about an old penny arcade machine and trying to do some "Transfomers"-style magic on it. (SIDENOTE: what is "Transformers"-style magic? Making something incomprehensible and unbearable to watch?) That's like making a movie about an old carnival fortune-telling machine. That will never work!
Actually, it's more like making a movie about an Easy Bake Oven, a script for which I am sure is sitting on some assistant's desk somewhere. "We've got to raise $50,000 with these lightbulb muffins or we'll have to leave the Goondocks." Sold. Low to high millions.
