I hear there’s going to be a movie version of Gilligan’s Island and naturally I’ve got something to say about that, but to do it I have to say something about Sex and the City first.
TV Guide produced a TV show last week called Television’s Greatest Blunders and one of these great blunders was Dana Delany’s decision to pass on the role of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City.
Ridiculous.
This was only a blunder if Sex and the City was going to be a hit no matter what and that Delany could have and should have known that at the time.
There is more reason to think that the show would have failed miserably with Delany in the lead. That’s not a knock on Delany. Almost every show put on the air fails for one reason or another. Hits come along like freaks of nature and while lots of smart people can say why after the fact very, very few can say why a show that hasn’t aired will be a hit and be right in more than a stopped clock way.
One thing that hit shows have in common, though, is a cast the audience falls in love with right away.
Especially the leads.
Sarah Jessica Parker is the better actress, but more in her favor is that she is the more compelling screen presence. Delany’s pretty in the wholesome former cheerleader/girl next door way. Parker is pretty in a way that defies conventional notions of prettiness. She’s actually sort of weird looking. Plus, at the time the show went on the air in 1998, Parker was 33 years old, Delany was 42. Much of Sex and the City’s charm (if you thought it was charming. I did, to my own surprise) depended on Carrie’s little girl lost mixture of haplessness and pluck. She’d get herself lost in the woods, surrounded by lions, tigers, and bears, and then almost accidentally shoo them away mainly by being cute.
That act began to wear thin while Parker was still in her 30s because Parker, naturally, began to look less and less like a little girl. A young woman in her early 30s who felt stuck in at the same point in her career and her love life that she was at when she was in her middle 20s can flail around desperately and still be sympathetic. A middle-aged woman---or man---flailing like that instead of adapting or finding mature alternatives starts looking pathetic real fast, which is why one of the themes of the show became how Carrie and her friends were growing more realistic and practical, which is to say how they were becoming grown-ups at last.
Delany would have had to play Carrie as a grown up from the beginning or risk humiliating herself, and that would have been a very different show.
But here’s another thing.
Good casting isn’t just putting the right actor in the right part, it’s putting the right actors in the right parts together.
If Delany had been Carrie, the cast around her would have had to change to complement her. The producers might have chosen another Charlotte, a blonde instead of the brunette Kristin Davis, perhaps, because they worried that two brunettes couldn’t be told apart at a glance. Or they might have gone with a different actress as Miranda because Cynthia Nixon and Delany were both tall and willowy. Or decided that Kim Catrell was too much like Delany in her conventional former cheerleader prettiness.
In fact, the two are such similar types that Delany could have been cast as Samantha just as well.
It might have turned out that Delany had no chemistry with Chris Noth and who else could have played Big?
Good casting is everything, as Robert Altman says in that video clip I posted Wednesday, and it’s contingent. Sex and the City was about those four actresses in those four roles, same as all movies and TV shows and plays are about their characters and the actors and actresses playing them.
Now, about a movie version of Gilligan’s Island.
First, who needs it?
Unless you’ve never seen the show, my guess is that the fun’s going to wear off right after the Jonas Brothers sing the theme song. Five minutes in, after the seven stranded castaways are introduced you’re going to start thinking, Why aren’t I just watching old episodes of the original TV show?
Unlike Get Smart or The Addams Family----the only two TV shows whose movie adaptations came close to being as good or as fun as the originals, until Star Trek---Gilligan’s Island didn’t have a plot or a theme.
Underneath the silliness, Get Smart was a spy story. It was about good guy secret agents thwarting bad guy secret agents. The Addams Family was about a collection of weirdos and misfits confronting a conventional society that has no use for weirdos and misfits.
Gilligan’s Island was about keeping the castaways stranded on the island so that there could be another episode next week about keeping the castaways stranded on the island.
Either the movie will be an hour and a half episode, the wiser course for the producers, so that we spend the whole time waiting for the inevitable, Gilligan to save the day and screw everything up at the same time, and like l said, Who needs that when you can just watch an old episode?
Or there will be a PLOT. And Hollywood has a terrible track record when it comes to adding PLOTS to movies that don’t come with one built in.
Concept + PLOT generally = something like Wild, Wild West.
Then there’s the casting.
Except for one of the seven, the castaways aren’t so much characters as stock characters that have been around since the Greeks wore masks. The inept servant, the blowhard boss, the dreamy intellectual, the sex kitten, the girl next door, the spoiled society matron. Just about anybody who fits the general physical type could play them, and my bet would be on the producers casting just about anybody. They could go with gimmick casting and try to cast stars but then they’d better be able to sign stars and not “stars” for all the parts or it will look pretty cheesy. Think of Tom Arnold as Quentin McHale or Jim Varney as Jed Clampett.
I’ll be getting to that one character who’s an actual character in a minute, although I’m sure you know which one I’m talking about, but he and the Skipper are the only ones who offer you some flexibility in choosing for physical appearance. The Skipper is only fat because Alan Hale Jr. was fat. He needs to be big, as a contrast to Gilligan, and for the authority that comes with size and to look protective. But he doesn’t have to be played by a John Goodman. Although Goodman would be a fine choice.
But Gilligan has to be young and thin and goofily cute but not handsome. Ginger has to be tall, leggy, curvy, and red haired or else she wouldn’t be called Ginger. Mary Ann has to be smaller than Ginger, perkily pretty, and look scrumptious with the tails of her calico shirt knotted under her breasts. The professor should be slim and handsome but somewhat nerdy, like Gary Cooper in Ball of Fire. Mrs Howell---Lovey---has to be elegant and middle-aged and retain something of the debutante who would have earned the nickname Lovey. Other than that, the actors don’t need to be much of anything else.
Except good together.
The job is not to cast individual characters. The job is to cast a troupe of character actors who work well as a group.
Now, about that one character who stands apart and stands on his own.
Thurston B. Howell III was the character Jim Backus made of him. Mr Howell was created for Backus and Backus made the most of it. He owned the role more completely than Don Adams owned Maxwell Smart or John Ratzenberger owned Cliff Clavin or Steve Carrell owns Michael Scott.
I’m not sure how much of a contribution Backus made to the actual writing, although the dialog in his scenes is so much sharper, wittier, and more idiosyncratic that I wouldn’t be surprised that he was ad libbing his way through every episode. But if the words weren’t written by him he made them his. And he made Mr Howell such a combination of spoiled brat, clueless pantaloon, conniving snake oil salesman, and overgrown little boy that the writers were able to use him as a villain in some episodes, as a bumbling father figure in others, and as a hero of some more. With Backus in the role, the writers essentially had nine people to work with on that island.
I can’t imagine who can play the part without turning it into an imitation of Backus---and again we’re back to, Why not just watch the show?---or trying to make Mr Howell into his own role, in which case you begin not to have a movie version of Gilligan’s Island.
But then I wouldn’t have imagined Raul Julia as Gomez Addams before he was cast or that Julia, who had never seen the original Addams Family before he got the part, would have been so blown away by John Astin that he would turn his performance into an homage to Astin---fortunately Julia was good enough that he could do this without making it an impersonation of Astin.
I’m not saying a Gilligan’s Island movie can’t be done well, although the odds are heavy against it. I’m just saying the casting is going to be tricky.
But there is one aspect of the original show that I don’t see how a movie version will be able to deal with.
Sex.
To be more accurate, the absence of sex.
In 1966, a show that was about some young and very attractive people stranded together on a deserted island could get away with pretending that the young and attractive people wouldn’t notice that they were young and attractive and act upon it. Gilligan and the Professor were assumed to be as blind as little boys to the fact that Ginger and Mary Ann were girls, and, despite Ginger’s occasional vamping, she and Mary Ann were only that much more aware of sex than a couple of sixth grade girls would be than their younger brothers. The four of them were very tall children because most of the audience was made up of children and to them life on a desert island would be no phone, no lights, no motor cars, not a single luxury, but they wouldn’t count sex as one of those missing luxuries. Parents knew better but they were glad to let it slide because of the kids.
The audience for the movie is not going to be little boys and little girls. In fact, the producers are going to to do everything they can to make sure it isn’t. They want the theaters full of teenagers and twentysomethings.
Who will expect that Ginger, a character based on Marilyn Monroe, will act like Marilyn Monroe and that Gilligan and the Professor, and even the Skipper, will respond accordingly.
And why would Mary Ann just sit by and watch Ginger get all the attention?
What this will likely mean is that the PLOT of the movie is going to include one, maybe two, love stories.
Mush. On Gilligan’s Island?
I’d rather just watch the show.
You know, Lance, the disdain with which you use the word "mush" drips off the page. (You owe me a keyboard, but never mind that now.) And yet, and yet . . . you are married to the Blonde and have two sons, and you appear to dote on all three.
I call inconsistency!
Posted by: Linkmeister | Friday, March 05, 2010 at 03:20 PM
There are reasons that the Skipper and Gilligan wouldn't react if Ginger sexed up the part. The Professor may be another matter, but I always saw him as the type who votes for Mary Ann in the endless Ginger or Mary Ann debates. Maybe the movie's major sub-plot will be Ginger v. Mary Ann.
Posted by: CJColucci | Friday, March 05, 2010 at 04:42 PM
Christina Hendricks is the obvious choice for Ginger.
Posted by: Marymayweather | Friday, March 05, 2010 at 05:30 PM
Or maybe the major sub-plot will be Ginger and Mary Ann! That would put a real postmodern stamp on the Island.
But I'm with Lance. Just watch the TV show.
Posted by: KLG | Friday, March 05, 2010 at 08:50 PM
If this goes through, there is only one man who can play Thurston Howell: Christopher Walken.
Posted by: Dave | Friday, March 05, 2010 at 09:30 PM
But maybe they will take Gilligan in a new and creative direction! With good writers and a talented cast, they could ...
Oh, yeah, and why don't we put on a show in the barn ...
Posted by: CathiefromCanada | Saturday, March 06, 2010 at 01:15 AM
First of all, I thought they already MADE a movie version of Gilligan's Island, which flopped of course. I seem to recall seeing a movie poster with the new cast, all of whom were selected becasue they sort of resembled the original actors, standing in a group on a beach. Pehraps I imagined it, or imagine remembering it.
Anyway, the concept of Gilligan's Island has been supplanted by Survivor. I'm not sure anyone but Jeff Probst will every be able to take the place of the professor.
And third, your post is all about the reason why a movie version of GG probably ought to just be a porn film...
PS-Gilligan's Island was one of the few shows that was actually BANNED from our house, because it was so stupid (but I liked it..."Juuuuust sit right back and yuuul hear a tale...."
Posted by: mac macgillicuddy | Saturday, March 06, 2010 at 08:16 AM
mac, if Gilligan's was banned, how was Petticoat Junction treated?
Posted by: Linkmeister | Saturday, March 06, 2010 at 01:44 PM
Speaking as one of the people who owns the DVD of Rescue from GI ($1.00), you would almost have to reconceptualize the series. (The big problem is that all of the plots were in Season One, but all the shows we remember fondly--Phil Silver, radioactive vegetables--are all Season Three.)
Ginger and Mary Ann living together for, er, A Good Reason might be a start.
Posted by: Ken Houghton | Saturday, March 06, 2010 at 09:43 PM
Link, I remember watching Petticoat Junction on what I seem to recall as Sunday evenings. So I guess it was allowed. Also on the banned list were The Beverly Hillbillies, It's About Time and, of all things, Hogans Heroes.
Posted by: mac macgillicuddy | Sunday, March 07, 2010 at 07:41 AM
Great thoughts on Sex and the City. I'm surprised they seriously considered Delaney if she was that much older than the character. It's not like she's some great actress who could have pulled it off, either. She's capable, but doesn't have that spark.
Posted by: Batocchio | Sunday, March 07, 2010 at 06:00 PM