It finally happened.
According to Done Deal, the screenwriting forum and resource site, Warner Bros. Pictures has purchased the screenplay for "Gilligan's Island," the undeniably popular, wildly illogical 1960s sitcom many contemporary critics cited as evidence of the death of American culture. The big-screen script was written by Brad Copeland, a former showrunner for "Arrested Development" and "My Name is Earl." For the big screen, he wrote the script for Wild Hogs and, appropriately, the currently in-production Yogi Bear (featuring the voice of Justin Timberlake as Boo-Boo).
Mr. Copeland is a living embodiment of the ever-increasing imagination gap between movies and television. The series he worked on were delightfully inventive: His big-screen efforts are either 30-year-old TV shows... or Wild Hogs.
Still: it's time to sit back and watch the the internet for the coming avalanche of "casting suggestions" for Gilligan's Island. Oooh, let me start! Robert Pattinson as The Professor, Kristin Stewart as Mary Ann, Megan Fox as Ginger, John Goodman as The Skipper, and Robert Pattinson as Gilligan. That'll work.
As mentioned, I learned of this from Done Deal-- a fascinating website, because it makes no bones about how Hollywood screenwriting actually works: on two nearly unconnected levels.
In the forums, which lie below the main page like a labyrinthine basement, hundreds of threads churn about all aspects of the craft, from simple issues of punctuation and how to write montages to peer review and which contests to enter. Most of the contributors are who you'd think they are: aspirants, mixed with semi-successful writers and a few genuine players. I ain't putting it down: I got a few interesting leads from the site.
On the top of the homepage the "Latest Deals" are displayed in bold. And the names of those landing the deals rarely coincide with those in the forums below. Like Brad Copeland, most of the the writers of the done deals have familiar names and long histories. And the connection between the denizens of the forum and the folks getting signed seems to be limited to the fact they appear on the same website.
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As often happens, the worst thing about this idea is that the money people think it's a pre-sold property but their target audience was born 10 years after the show stopped showing up in reruns.
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