Thursday, September 01, 2005

Hollywood – Clueless Again

Just to lighten things up – I've been watching Katrina coverage on and off all day and it's really bleak – I think this comedy, pitched all around Hollywood about terrorists sounds hysterical.
"The Cell," as this exercise in envelope-pushing is titled, has been making its way through Hollywood for more than a year, cracking up development executives and their assistants, being passed from friend to friend like an underground newspaper behind the Iron Curtain, and winning its creators, Mark Jordan Legan and Mark F. Wilding, scores of meetings and three other writing assignments.
But Hollywood, in its inimitable style, has decided it's too sophisticated for the masses to grok, so no go.
Though a number of dramatic movies and mini-series about 9/11 are already being produced, executives who passed on "The Cell" told the writers they feared that Americans - particularly in New York and Washington - were nowhere near ready for a sitcom that could be seen as trivializing the attacks, even after four years.
And this has got to be one of the funniest lines in the article.
Executives at Fox, the writers and their agents said, countered that maybe the terrorists could be Albanians - or demons.
Albanians, yeah, that's inoffensive, because, um, they're our allies. But I guess they are counting on the fact that no one but Albanians paid any attention. Or demons. Hum. I'm sensing someone's still regretting the all too early death of Angel.

Besides, don't they get the point that it's much funnier if it's actually terrorists? Not Albanians. Or demons.

You have to hand it to the Times, for once, for running the article in order to help get the show an audience.

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