It’s been almost six months since I posted my three part essay on Hollywood remakes, so I thought now would be a good time to refresh that series of articles, especially in light of the most recent coming attractions press releases from Tinsel Town. Before year-end, just in time for 2007 Academy Award consideration, moviegoers can expect to see newly updated versions of some well regarded classics in theaters. Less than a year after Glenn Ford was interred at Woodlawn Memorial Cemetery in Santa Monica, Tom Cruise’s production company has announced that the actor’s first project with his actress wife Katie Holmes will be to remake the Ford-Rita Hayworth classic Gilda (1946). But perhaps the most shocking news so far came this past week with the announcement that Casablanca (1942), long thought to be the holy grail of such revisions, will be remade (though its release is slated for 2008).

When Warner Bros. purchased the rights to an unproduced play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison titled Everybody Goes to Rick’s because of its exotic locale, nobody had any idea that it would become the Academy’s Best Picture winner in 1943. In fact, according to Clive Hirschhorn’s The Warner Bros. Story, the initial screenplay work by Julius J. & Philip G. Epstein "amounted to little more than a heady concoction of melodramatic incidents with no discernable narrative thrust whose excitement relied on stock situations and two-dimensional characters. Howard Koch was called in to give the Epstein treatment its center of gravity, and although he succeeded, it was Michael Curtiz, bulldozing his way through the cliches, who was responsible for turning second-rate material into sublime screen entertainment." Koch shared the Best Writing, Screenplay Oscar with the Epsteins, and director Curtiz also took home the gold. Now, sixty-five years later, another studio will try to duplicate the film voted by the American Film Institute as the Greatest Love Story and the second Greatest Movie of All-Time. Since none of the casting information has been released, there’s no way to know who will be chosen to utter dialogue immortalized by Humphrey Bogart like "Here's looking at you, kid.", "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.", "We'll always have Paris." or "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." to say nothing of Ingrid Bergman’s line "Play it, Sam. Play 'As Time Goes By.'" or Claude Rains’s "Round up the usual suspects." (all six of which appear on AFI’s 100 Greatest Movie Quotes list).

After her success in the 2005 remake of the Vincent Price horror classic House of Wax (1953), Paris Hilton has signed on to play (appropriately) the nude swimming Sondra, originally played by Jane Wyatt, in the third screen adaptation of James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon. Whereas Frank Capra’s 1937 version was set in 1935 and featured Ronald Colman as British diplomat Robert Conway and Sam Jaffe as the High Lama in the Himalayan-bound utopia Shangri-La, the updated remake is set in present day Tibet and will feature Sean Penn as a U.S. Ambassador and Richard Gere as the Dalai Lama.

Finally, Steve Martin will add to his comedy remake repertoire – a resume that includes playing a modern day Cyrano de Bergerac in Roxanne (1987), two stints as Father of the Bride, one as Sgt. Bilko (1996), The Out-of-Towners (1999), two Cheaper By the Dozen comedies, and most recently as France’s bumbling Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther (2006) – when he attempts to repeat three more characters (including the title role and the POTUS) originally played by Peter Sellers in a remake of the Stanley Kubrick black comedy classic Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Others rumored to be considered for the cast include: Alec Baldwin as the ambitious General 'Buck' Turgidson who rationalizes the loss of 10-12 million civilians, John Malkovich as crazy Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper who starts World War III, Tim Allen as Colonel 'Bat' Guano who’s in charge of base security, John Goodman as Major T.J. 'King' Kong who rides a nuclear warhead bronco style towards its target, and Peter Stormare as the Russian Ambassador.

I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of looking forward to seeing this last one!

Oh yeah, what day is today?  April Fool's!