Sep 24 2009 Disney Upset Mamet's 'Diary of Anne Frank' Too Dark, Not About Anne Frank

Disney is reportedly stalling plans for their adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank after discovering that David Mamet's screenplay, which for some reason the studio thought would be "Disney style" despite being a David Mamet screenplay that is about the Holocaust, is not at all in the Disney style. Also, it's not really about the The Diary of Anne Frank:

Developed by the studio’s chief of production, Oren Aviv, the project was recently rejected by the studio as “too dark” and put in turnaround, according to people involved.

But the screenplay is not a retelling of the famous Holocaust drama taken from the diaries of Frank, but about a contemporary Jewish girl who goes to Israel and learns about the traumas of suicide bombing.

"It's very intense, and dark and scary," said the executive. "It's not a film version of 'The Diary of Anne Frank.' The story evolved into something more intense."

Hopefully things go smoother when Disney moves on to hiring Quentin Tarantino to adapt Night.

Mamet's Anne Frank in Turnaround from Disney [WaxWorld]

Aug 14 2009 David Mamet's Effin' 'Anne Frank' Script

Seems I wasn't the only one with the really brilliant (obvious) idea of doing Anne Frank-themed parodies of famous David Mamet quotes after the announcement the writer/director would be adapting The Diary of Anne Frank into a new feature film. Get Your War On's David Rees has taken the notion one step further and written out four most-likely-accurate script pages. Pretty funny if you're familiar with Mamet; otherwise you'll probably have some questions about why the Nazi Commander has a stack of index cards with Jew leads.

Aug 12 2009 Anne Frank's Diary Being Re-Written in Mamet Speak

David Mamet, one of the few writer/directors I trust not to try to somehow update the story to include micro-blogging, has signed on to write and direct a film version of The Diary of Anne Frank. Now 8th grade teachers will definitively know when their kids watched the movie instead of reading the book when a student notes Frank's "terse, clever, edgy dialogue":

The film will be an amalgamation of the famed diary; the stage adaptation by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich; and Mamet's own original take on the material that could reframe the story as a young girl's rite of passage. Frank, who died at 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, became an icon of the Holocaust after the post-war publication of the diary that she kept during the two years that her family hid in a secret attic apartment in Amsterdam.

In light of this news, I'll be spending the next several days mentally adapting famous Mamet quotes to fit into the The Diary of Anne Frank.

"A.B.H.: Always Be Hiding!"

"Everyone hates Nazis; that's why we call them Nazis!"

Feel free to continue in the comments.

David Mamet takes on 'Anne Frank' [Variety]

Jul 9 2009 The 'Spartan'-Obama Conspiracy! (Not Really a Conspiracy)

Did Obama base his entire campaign around a single shot in Spartan? Probably not--unless we later find out the guy is secretly a huge David Mamet fan--but IWS reader Juan J. Arroyo sent in the above still from the 2004 film, and the similarities are indeed striking.

Probably just a coincidence, and I'm sure Obama won't continue following the Spartan storyline by having a daughter murdered (Spartan spoiler), but it is also pretty weird how, if you piece together all of Val Kilmer's dialogue, it ends up being Obama's entire inauguration speech backwards.

(If you want to see it yourself, it's around the 1:05 mark on your home video player.)