Patrick McGoohan in the original ITC version of The Prisoner
Two happy discoveries over the weekend were immediately followed by two gut-wrenching, soul-aggravating discoveries: Cable TV On Demand is offering for free all 17 episodes of 1967’s The Prisoner 1988’s They Live. For those of my readers who were too young to remember what The Prisoner was about, it’s basically the story of a secret agent who resigns from the British Secret Service. Refusing to give the reasons for his resignation, he is kidnapped to an undisclosed village by the sea and interrogated. One episode after another, McGoohan’s character “No.6″ tries to escape while his captors foils his plans with labyrinthine schemes worthy of Jorge Luis Borges’ games with time. The series was all about defiance and one man’s commitment to hang on to his identity, individuality, and freedom.
Remarkably ahead of his time, McGoohan not only co-created the series, but even wrote and directed several episodes. Cool, collected, and determined, No.6 is perhaps best summed up by No. 2 when he said “he can even make the simple act of putting on a jacket look defiant.” McGoohan was also Albert Broccoli’s first choice to play James Bond in Dr. No. Our man said No.
To this day, The Prisoner remains my most beloved TV Series.
Rowdy Roddy Piper came to chew gum and stop remakes. He’s all out of gum.
John Carpenter’s They Live was a digested version of the Prisoner’s message, presenting us with a pair of sunglasses that can separate the conformist ghouls from regular people. Hilariously, all the ghouls were well-dressed yuppies….this was the mid 80s. And the fight scene between the protagonist “buddies” is so epic that even Peter Griffin and Ernie the Chicken will wince at the gnarly index of whup-ass involved. What amazed me was that They Live combined the dialogue between sociologists and feminists of the time, commenting on subliminal ad campaigns and the power of media to influence the way we think and behave. The screenplay actually echoed many of the conceptual art of its time, primarily those of Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, both of the Guerrilla Girls. You would expect something like that from Kieslowski or Bunuel, but not from the dude who brought you Big Trouble In Little China.
And now, the bad news.
The Prisoner is already remade and will air November 09 on AMC.
The rights to They Live are being negotiated and will be remade shortly thereafter.
Did you know there are youtube guitar nerds who criticize famous guitar players, mocking signature riffs by fluidly and effortlessly playing them note-for-note. But what have these youtube gods created? Nothing. All they have done is mock an original piece of work and an original way of phrasing, they haven’t created anything new. You can’t have a better “remake” than an original idea. You can throw in all the CGI effects and even Hollywood’s new secret weapon: Seth Rogan. But however you cut, slice, splice, recolor, and rescript it, it all still boils down to the same thing: You’re working with second hand goods.
This concludes the 32,501st Google Search result for “Hollywood is Out of Ideas”
