I’m not sure if Les Grossman, the foul-mouthed Hollywood producer Tom Cruise brought to hilairous life in Tropic Thunder, is such a good idea to star in his own movie, but it’s happening whether we like it or not. Via EW:
Stiller released this statement today: “Les Grossman’s life story is an inspiring tale of the human class struggle to achieve greatness against all odds. He has assured me he plans to quote ‘F**king kill the sh*t out of this movie and make Citizen f**king Kane look like a piece of crap home movie by the time we are done.’ I am honored to be working with him.” Added Adam Goodman, Paramount Film Group President, “Everything I learned in this business, I’ve learned from Les. I started out as his assistant, and from the first day he threw his desk at me when I got his lunch order wrong, I have loved him like a father.”
Characters with the intensity of Grossman are often best in small doses. On the other hand, the problems with Get Him to the Greek result from the film not embracing enough the mania of Aldous Snow, the rock star Russell Brand first created in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Snow’s insanity is of a less amped-up quality than Grossman’s, though; I have a sense that Grossman may wear out his welcome in far less than 90 minutes in a way that Snow did not.
What other secondary characters deserve their own movies?
I’ve always thought that those Han Solo novels by Brian Daley [Amazon U.S.] [Amazon Canada] [Amazon U.K.] would have been fun movies (not that Han was exactly secondary, but here he wouldn’t have to share the spotlight with Luke and Leia).
Have fun…
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Ardeth Bay from The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. Surely there were more mummy-fighting tales to be told about the Med-jai.
Not that I think the character deserves a movie per se, but I think that the amount Dreamworks is calling this the ‘last’ Shrek movie is fating us for a Donkey spin-off.
It’s a shame Bruce Campbell is too old to do it now but I really would have liked to have seen a Sand Pirates of the Sahara movie far more than almost anything Jim Carrey has done since The Majestic.
But then it seems to be the tradition in Hollywood nowadays to give us more of what we don’t want and less of what we do want. After all, why on earth would we want a Les Grossman movie when Garry Trudeau has been writing about similar characters for years?
How about a Princess Bride prequel: the exciting true crime adventures of Vizzini’s gang, with Fezzik and Inigo Montoya.
Or a Galaxy Quest spin-off featuring Fred Kwan (the wonderful Tony Shalhoub) and Laliari making a go of inter-planetary romance.
Shepherd Book. I’d like to see a movie about the early years, before he picked up the “shepherd” title.