Nineties comedy Soapdish is the latest casualty of Hollywood’s remake craze. Writer/director/actor Ben Schwartz has just been hired by Paramount to pen the remake.
Ben Schwartz should bring the necessary humor to the script considering his experience writing for Robot Chicken, the crudely humorous stop-motion animated TV series. He is also credited with writing Hugh Jackman’s opening number at the Academy Awards last year, so I think his comedic credentials are established.
A meager decade does not protect a perfectly satisfactory comedy from re-imagining. The original Soapdish came out in 1991, and offered a sometimes heavy-handed satire of the world behind the scenes of daytime TV. And who better to produce a comedy about soap operas than Aaron Spelling (90210, Melrose Place) himself? Spelling produced the original with Michael Hoffman (One Fine day) directing. The original film not only provided plenty of laughs, but boasted of a cast including comedic heavy-weights Sally Field, Kevin Kline, Robert Downey Jr., Whoopi Goldberg, Cathy Moriarty, Garry Marshall and Kathy Najimy. I’m not sure why Paramount has decided to take a perfectly adequate but unspectacular comedy from the 90s and remake it, but given the cast of the original this remake better astound (or else, why bother?).
