News > Little Miss Sunshine Writer Brings Witherspoon to a Midnight Remake

Via: Variety

Written by:  Noah Sanders

Little Miss Sunshine was an extremely overrated film:  a mish-mash of indy comic cliches and a sort of audience-pandering sap that combined into an enjoyable but not Oscar-worthy film.  Still, it brought it an assload of money, and now screenwriter Michael Arndt is in the position to do just about anything he wants (you know a screenwriter has done something right when you can actually remember his name). And he's decided what he wants to do:

A remake of the Billy Wilder-written screwball comedy classic Midnight.  The film originally starred Claudette Colbert and Don Ameche, but due to the six or seven feet of earth the two actors are currently buried under, it looks like Arndt is writing the flick with the former Mrs. Phillipe, Reese Witherspoon.  Not exactly the fast talkin', lip-givin' lady I was thinking of, but she does exude a sort of 1930s fireball charm.  

The 1939 film was about a gold-digging hussy, one of the 1930s oddest heroines, who impersonates a baroness in Paris to try and score a rich sugar daddy, but ends up falling in love with a poor shmuck of a taxi driver.  

I'm worried for Arndt.  The screwball comedy has been tried over and over again since the death of the studio system nearly sixty years ago, and no one can get it right.  One of the main problems of the genre is that its fast-talking, conversation-based storylines are rooted in the 30s and 40s.  When watching a screwball comedy you give yourself over to the era of filmmaking and the ratatatat style of conversation becomes believable because of its context.  Today, after years and years of grit and toughness, the comedic potential of a fast talking dame ripping on a poor shmuck just isn't enough. We need special effects and explosions and rampant nudity, and the screwball comedy originates from a far tamer place where these things don't exist. I mean the Coen Brothers tried with Intolerable Cruelty and the sticky goo of cheese still sticks in the back of my throat.  And if two of the best filmmakers of the last thirty years can't handle the genre, Mr. Arndt, well, you better come in to this thing with your game face on.