HOLLYWOOD

Updating an older, successful movie tends to be financially safe.
By GLENN LOVELL
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
The great John Huston, whose r & eacute;sum & eacute; included "The African Queen" and "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," had little good to say about his industry's maddening habit of repeating itself. "Don't remake good movies," the director once groused. "Remake bad ones!"
What would Huston think of the current glut of Hollywood remakes? Everywhere you look these days there are big-budget redos: "Dawn of the Dead," "Ned Kelly" and "The Ladykillers" -- all, ahem, "re-imaginings" of cult favorites.
They follow in the choppy wake of numerous star-vehicle remakes, including "Swept Away" with Madonna, "Cheaper by the Dozen" with Steve Martin, "Freaky Friday" with Jamie Lee Curtis, "Ocean's Eleven" with George Clooney and "The Italian Job," "Planet of the Apes" and "The Truth About Charlie" (a modern-day "Charade") all with Mark Wahlberg, Hollywood's Remake King.
Technically speaking, the last two best-picture Oscar winners were remakes. "Chicago" is a musical version of the silent "Chicago" from 1927 and "Roxie Hart" from 1941, and "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy owes something to Ralph Bakshi's animated "LOTR," which covered a book-and-a-half of the trilogy in 1978.
Other remakes
Recent remakes and some that are right around the corner:
U"Walking Tall" (April 2), with the Rock now meting out vigilante justice in a Pacific Northwest town full of drug dealers.
U"The Alamo" (April 9), with Billy Bob Thornton as an unlikely stand-in for Duke Wayne's musket-wielding Davy Crockett.
U"The Stepford Wives" (June 11), with Nicole Kidman taking over for Katharine Ross as a newcomer to a town full of automaton hausfrauen.
U"The Manchurian Candidate" (July 30), with Denzel Washington subbing for Frank Sinatra as a war veteran racing to foil a programmed assassin.
U"Alfie" (Sept. 17) with Jude Law as the charming louse originally played by Michael Caine.
And that, friends, is just for starters.
More to come
Now in various stages of production, pre-production or script rewrites are updates and/or comic variations of "El Cid," "Suspicion," "House of Wax," "The Poseidon Adventure," "War of the Worlds," "Flight of the Phoenix," "The Shaggy Dog," "Straw Dogs," "Two Thousand Maniacs," "Logan's Run," "Precinct 13," "The Wild Bunch," "The Bride of Frankenstein," "The Pink Panther," "The Longest Yard," "The Hills Have Eyes," "The Defiant Ones," "Fun with Dick and Jane," "Bell, Book and Candle," "Fahrenheit 451," "Valley of the Dolls," "I Married a Witch," "The Women," "Superfly" and "The Swimmer," with Alec Baldwin taking over for Burt Lancaster as the neurotic Everyman who vows to "swim home."
There are so many remakes in the pipeline -- Peter Jackson has swapped Hobbits for King Kong, Adam Sandler and Chris Rock are giving "The Longest Yard" a comic makeover, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have teamed up again for "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" -- that rather than ask, "What's next?" it almost would save time to enumerate those rare original-screenplay projects.
Nothing new
Remakes, of course, have been around for as long as celluloid has flapped through a projector. "Remakes are a staple of Hollywood: In the old days, the studios remade their hits every five or six years," says director Phil Kaufman, whose "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1978) is that rare remake that's as good as or better than the black-and-white original (directed by Don Siegel in 1956).
"They're part of the American movie-going diet," agrees Paul Dergarabedian of Exhibitor Relations, a box-office tracking service. "Studios have always returned to their archives, sometimes with huge success, sometimes with disastrous results." (Jonathan Demme's "The Truth About Charlie," wherein Wahlberg and Thandie Newton stood in for Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, qualifies as one of the most recent disasters.)
The 1932 back-lot nugget "What Price Hollywood?" became "A Star Is Born" with Janet Gaynor (1937), then Judy Garland (1954), then Barbra Streisand (1976). "High Sierra" with Bogie became "I Died a Thousand Times" and "Colorado Territory." The Depression-era tearjerker "Little Miss Marker," originally starring Shirley Temple, is brushed off every 20 years or so (mostly recently in 1980 for Walter Matthau and Julie Andrews).
Not even Capra, Ford, Hitchcock and, yes, Huston were above the practice. The first three remade their own hits; Huston made his directing debut with the second, and much-superior, remake of "The Maltese Falcon." Huston's own noir classic "The Asphalt Jungle" was remade three times by others, once as an Egyptian caper, once as a western.
Reasons for updates
The need to update and recast seems especially prevalent at the moment. How come?
Pat answer: As established "name brands," they can be relatively safe from a financial standpoint. "A movie is remade precisely because it was a success, and it feels like it's surefire," explains Paul Seydor, author-editor-director of an Oscar-nominated short on "The Wild Bunch."
And when the average price of a studio film is $40 million, playing it safe has never been more important. Universal was hardly going out on a limb with its remake of the 1978 zombie classic "Dawn of the Dead." The new digitized, Milwaukee-set version comes with exploitable title and built-in audience. Little wonder it opened in the No. 1 spot two weeks ago, grossing more than $27 million.
"You have a sort of built-in thing," notes Seydor. "You're OK as long as you don't touch something that's absolutely a sacred cow, like 'Citizen Kane' or 'Treasure of the Sierra Madre.'"
Also, many in today's 14-to-27-year-old target audience aren't familiar with the original "Dawn of the Dead" or "Ocean's Eleven." To their young eyes, the remake is the original.
"Our memory is pretty short right now," says Kaufman, whose credits also include "The Right Stuff," "Quills" and the current "Twisted" with Ashley Judd. "Unfortunately, we no longer live in a film culture. The history of film doesn't extend much beyond the Spielberg era."
Dergarabedian agrees. "These filmgoers have no idea that they're seeing a remake," he says, pointing to "Dawn of the Dead." "Many of them weren't born when the originals made their mark."