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The is a bit of an oddity, though I don’t know why I didn’t know about it until now, almost six years after the fact. It’s a 24-minute “Zoom movie” done in 2020 during COVID as a fundraiser for World Central Kitchen – that’s the “third” (sort of) in the now-trilogy of Father of the Bride movies, called Father of the Bride Part 3 (ish). The entire cast is reunited, along with a few additions that includes one big, uncredited surprise. And it’s written and directed by Nancy Meyers, who made the first two films. With such pedigree, I was hoping it to be a great treat. But it’s not especially funny, though still enjoyable to see for the reunion of everyone. (And I suspect it will probably better if you know ahead that it’s not especially funny, so your anticipation and expectations will be lower.) However, it does pick up a bit when Steve Martin enters. And two actors admirably really throw themselves into things – Martin Short (who comes in late) and Florence Pugh, who’s one of the additions, playing the granddaughter.
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On this week’s episode of 3rd & Fairfax, the official podcast of the Writers Guild of America, the guest is writer/director/actress Sarah Polley, whose films include Stories We Tell, Take This Waltz and Away from Her. She discusses writing and directing her latest film Women Talking, adapted from Miriam Toews’ novel about women in an isolated religious community who grapple with reconciling their faith with brutal reality.
Although for years the celebration moved around the calendar a bit more than in the past and was therefore somewhat difficult to track down (no pun intended), today -- we are full of joy to announce -- once again is that most grand fest, National Train Day. At least it is here at Elisberg Industries, and that's good enough as a starting point. You won't find it on any calendars for any number of reasons, but the most important is that since Amtrak funding got cut back they stopped promoting it after 2016. (And the reason for it moving around the calendar is that it was never a set day, but the Saturday closest to May 10. Why May 10, I hear you cry? Because that's the anniversary of the Golden Spike being driven in at Promontory Point, Utah, to complete the building of the Transcontinental Railroad.) But whether or not it remains an officially promoted holiday by the government -- and isn't being celebrated here on a proper Saturday due to prior commitments, think of it as the train running behind schedule -- National Train Day (or as it used to be known around these parts once upon a time as "Let's Make Chris Dunn's Head Explode Day," but no more since he now, at long last, acknowledges Bridge on the River Kwai as a train movie) is nonetheless still one of the most joyous holidays of the year.  This is from a trip I took a few years back from Los Angeles to Chicago. It's the dining car as the train passed through the prairie. There's a tale behind posting this, which I explained last year, but it bears repeating, since I’m still thrilled by it. A few years back, for reasons I can't explain, all my photos from that trip disappeared. I don't know if I accidentally deleted them or what -- but they were all gone. But last year, I discovered that all photos I'd taken with my mobile phone had been saved in the phone's memory! And so, I was able to recover them all! And it's therefore with joy once again that I get to post this photo. For our part here, we celebrate National Train Day on these pages by posting a list of the greatest train movies. These are films in which trains are absolutely central to the story. Where a train is the driving force of the tale, without which you can’t properly describe the plot. (Think of it like the classic and beloved Santa Claus song, "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." Santa Claus doesn't actually appear in the song at all. He hasn't even shown up yet. In most ways, it's about "you" and what you should do -- or better not do. But even though there's not a hint of Santa Claus even appearing in the song, without Santa Claus...there's no song.) We're strict about this. A friend once recommended The Taking of Pelham-1-2-3, and it was strongly considered, but that was a subway train or light rail. This list is for full-bore trains, the kind that either have sleeping cars and dining cars, or could if they were hitched on. But I've added it to our Honorable Mentions category. And strict, too, is that the list is for feature films only. Yes, I could have included TV movies and series, but I don't. It's just where I chose to draw the line. But that's why I created the Special Mentions category. Since the list is fluid, we keep adding to it. And so we have two additions this year. Suddenly is a little-seen film noir thriller from 1954, with Frank Sinatra and Sterling Hayden. It’s about an assassination plot to kill the president who is on a whistle-stop tour and will be arriving in a small town. Sinatra plays the psychotic character who kidnaps the family that lives directly across from the station, as he lies in wait. It’s a riveting movie, but Sinatra had it pulled out of circulation for many years after the Kennedy assassination. Compartment No. 6 was the official Finnish entry in 2021 as Best International Film. It was on shortlisted on the final 15, though not nominated. The movie is about a young woman traveling to northern Russia and makes an unexpected connection aboard the train. As I’ve noted, there are two other categories added a few years back: Honorable Mention is for movies which you can generally tell their stories without using the word "train," but they have some connection to trains -- usually a great, standout train sequence, supportive to the story, but not essential in telling the plot -- that makes them memorable. And later, I added a category of Special Mention, for works that don't qualify as a train movie or perhaps even as a movie at all, but deserve a place of honor. This year, I've included two new Honorable Mentions – The first is Alfred Hitchock’s legendary thriller, The 39 Steps. While not a full-throated train movie, the story is set in motion when Robert Donat’s character (wrongly pursued by the police) makes his escape on the Flying Scotsman train and crosses paths with Madeleine Carroll. The other is the Oscar-winning Best Picture The Sting. It has such a long and critical sequence on a train (where Paul Newman and Robert Redford set up their poker scam with Robert Shaw) that I came close to considering it a train movie – but clearly the core of The Sting is so much other than that and is one of the great con movies, so it gets Honorable Mention. I’ve also added two Special Mentions this year, a category specifically not for movies, but other works that are significantly train related. The two are both TV series. The first is 1968’s Iron Horse, with Dale Robertson as a gambler who wins a small, unfinished railroad and journeys around the country on behalf of his company in an effort to complete the line. The second series is the current Hell on Wheels, that centers on a revenge tale amid the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. And as I noted in the past, though something I think is likely very obvious, I love train movies. Here is the current list of Great Train Movies. 3:10 to Yuma (1957) Around the World in 80 Days Back to the Future 3 Bridge on the River Kwai Bullet Train The Commuter Compartment No. 6 The Darjeeling Limited Emperor of the North The 5:17 to Paris The General The Girl on the Train The Great Locomotive Chase The Great Train Robbery The Lady Vanishes Murder in the Private Car Murder on the Orient Express (1974) The Narrow Margin North by Northwest Northwest Frontier Night Train to Munich Polar Express Runaway Train Shanghai Express Silver Streak Snowpiercer Source Code Strangers on a Train Suddenly Terror on a Train Tough Guys The Train Transsiberian Twentieth Century Union Pacific Union Station Unstoppable Von Ryan’s Express Honorable Mention The 39 Steps At the Circus Berlin Express Cat Ballou Go West The Greatest Show on Earth Murder on the Orient Express (2017 remake) Planes, Trains and Automobiles Some Like It Hot Throw Momma from the Train The Sting Trading Places Special Mention Hell on Wheels (TV series) Iron Horse (TV series) The Railrodder (short) The Taking of Pelham-1-2-3 (light-rail subway trains) Murder on the Orient Express (TV version, from the series Poirot) Great Railway Journeys of the World (TV documentary) Nothing Like It in the World by Stephen Ambrose (book) Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad by David Haward Bain (book) I've also added another new feature in recent years -- a scene from one of the Great Train Movies, or another entry on the list. I thought that this year, because I just added Suddenly to the list, most people are likely unaware of it and it's excellent, so I’d post the trailer for the film. I suspect this is not the original trailer, or it may be but a distributer later added some music towards the end to “soften” the subject matter. But the movie comes across regardless. On this week’s ‘Not My Job’ segment of the NPR quiz show Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, the guest contestant is John Cusack. His interview with host Peter Sagal is low-key but very enjoyable, as he talks about still living in Chicago, where he grew up in Evanston, and tells stories about his many films, mostly in regards to the public’s reaction to them, including one very funny tale concerned “Say Anything.” This is the full Wait, Wait… broadcast, but you can jump directly to the “Not My Job” segment, it starts around the 19:00 mark. I am officially exhausted from dealing on social media with the far-right Trump enablers using a failed shooting to be what they consider a great marketing tool for an unnecessary mega-ballroom -- and for endlessly responding online to attacks on Jimmy Kimmel because they misunderstood a rude joke, including calls by Trump and the Mrs. that Kimmel be fired. Again. That didn't work out well the first time. And again, Kimmel won a Pulitzer Prize last week for his commentary after the first firing.
So, instead, I'll take a breaker and provide an update to an article I wrote a long while back about the current status of a what is perhaps the greatest unproduced screenplay, Harrow Alley, written in the early 1960s by Walter Brown Newman whose impressive credentials -- among many other works -- include The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven and Cat Ballou. (Newman was a crusty sort, and took his name off a few films when he was unhappy with changes to his work, one of them The Great Escape). Calling Harrow Alley "the greatest" unproduced script isn't just personal opinion, but as the original article notes, it was voted that in a couple of polls. For reasons too long to get into, a few weeks ago, I was scrolling through my archives and came upon this article, "The Greatest Screenplay Never Made,” which I’d written over a dozen years earlier (in fact, the first month this site started in January, 2013!), and realized there were a few things that should be added. One of those things is about that status of Harrow Alley in the intervening years, and the other is material that for the life of me I don’t know why I didn’t include in the original article. So, we'll address all of that. (If you're interested in the full story, I recommend reading that original article. In fact, if you do, I added this material as an Update to that article itself, however thought it deserved this standalone piece, since it was improbable -- if I didn't do so -- that many people here would be going back to read something they had no idea had so many new material added.) The current status is that whoever owns the rights to the movie at the moment – and it’s been hard to track down, though it might still be the George C. Scott estate…or not – Emma Thompson has been attached since around 2007 when she was hired to write a revision. (Around that time, the producer involved was Lindsay Doran, who had made such films as Sense and Sensibility, The Firm and Nanny McPhee. I haven’t seen that she’s still involved, however, so it strikes me as unlikely.) As of 2023, though, Emma Thompson was still with the film and working with a British production company, Bad Wolf, perhaps to develop it for TV. It’s unclear if it would be as a single movie or multi-part limited series…which would be encouraging since, given the original script’s length and effort over the years to trim it, a limited series would allow as much of the original material to be done as possible. Bad Wolf was founded in 2015 by former BBC executives Julie Gardner and Jane Tranter. In 2021, a majority interest in the company was bought by Sony Pictures TV. I came across a very promising quote from Emma Thompson on the project – not promising because of any information about it being made, but about her screenplay revision. The original screenplay by Walter Brown Newman is so superb I’ve been wary about any efforts to rework it for current sensibilities. And while her quote supports my wariness, the full quote adds an encouraging twist. She said that the revision of hers that she did initially is not what it would be all these years later. “His is the great work — my revisions are neither here nor there,” she told Scott Foster on his Moviemaker website. “I must tell you that the version of mine which perhaps you found online is one that was produced many years ago for a company that wanted a happy ending, amongst other not entirely suitable things.” She added that although that 2007 revision she wrote was reverent to Newman’s version, Foster wrote that “the producers asked her to make a few dramatic changes to fill in his most cryptic 30 pages with explanatory light. They injected plot in the gaps where Newman wanted none.” So, it would seem that if and when Harrow Alley does get made – with Emma Thompson’s involvement – those less than reverent changes she was required to make will be gone, and the script will be close to Walter Brown Newman’s “great work.” As for what I left out of the original article -- -- that’s my own, very-limited involvement trying to get the movie made. I was working at Universal Pictures in the mid-1980s, I worked at Universal Pictures in development, as an assistant to Bob Rehme who was the president of the studio. One day, I decided to pitch Harrow Alley to him – but knew if I was was too upfront about what the project was, it would likely scare him off. So, I first brought up that I’d come across a brilliant screenplay, and that it had long been considered in several articles and polls the greatest screenplay that had never yet been made into a movie, and that it was written by one of Hollywood’s great screenwriters who'd written movies such as The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven and Cat Ballou, as well as the classics Ace in the Hole (co-written with Billy Wilder and Lesser Samuels) and The Man with the Golden Arm (with Frank Sinatra, about drug addiction) -- and that though initially it was a challenging topic, it wasn’t anymore, and would make a tremendous movie. Bob was very excited at this point, and anxiously asked me what the project was. I said it was called Harrow Alley, and – at this point, I had no choice but to dive in, hoping that I’d set things up well enough – it was about the Black Plague in 1665 and… Well, there was nothing else needed to say, since his face dropped, his body shrank, and it was like all the air had been sucked out of the room. About 10 years later, I made another stab at getting Harrow Alley set up, though it was a far longer shot. With my friend Philippa Salisbury, we got a talented Hollywood financial expert to join us, and he budgeted the movie for workable cost. I had a copy of the budget for years – it was over 300 pages. After many years, there was no reason to keep it – but I did keep what is now one of my prize possessions (and I have absolutely no recollection how I came across it): a detailed blueprint for the London neighborhood of Harrow Alley that had been drawn for a prospective production of the movie – what year, I don’t know – designed and signed by Elliott Scott, the legendary art director and production designer whose credits include Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Dragonslayer, Evil Under the Sun, Labyrinth, The Pirates of Penzance, The Yellow Rolls-Royce and three Oscar nominations, among them one for Who Framed Roger Rabbit? We also came up with a semi-clever way to deal with long-standing studio concern of a 177-page screenplay: we retyped the script using a proportional Times-New Roman font that’s uses less space than the stand Courier. Our version came in at just 138 pages! (We knew it wouldn’t ultimately fool anyone, since they’d easily recognize the different font, but our hope was that the shorter length wouldn’t scare anyone off even before they read a word.) Alas, it was for naught. But we tried. And I’ve kept trying, if only to keep the name of Harrow Alley alive. And so, still, the only remaining question is if a studio is ready to step up and finally make Harrow Alley. Here's another "Popcorn in Bed" videos hosted by a young Canadian-American woman named Cassie, watching and commenting on a classic movie for the first time. She watches this one with her younger sister…and more than any other of her videos I've watched, I am stunned that neither of them had seen…"E.T."!!! (They both had seen some of it, but very little, long ago, and they remember almost none of it except for a few, early, random moments.) So, this is a fun rollercoaster ride to go on with them - as the watch "E.T." for the first time. |
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AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. 
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