Hollywood, rarely given to leaving well enough alone, is apparently conjuring how to further profit from an ice-pick-wielding, homicidal bisexual female.
Fine, but how does one do another ”Basic Instinct”?
July 31 Entertainment Weekly informs that ”one of the hot rumors going around Hollywood” (things must be slow in post-riot Los Angeles) is that actress Sharon Stone, but maybe not Michael Douglas, would reprise her starring role in a film that has grossed $110 million in the U.S.
It`s easy enough to deal with Douglas if he doesn`t return as the San Francisco detective, Nick Curran, who fell for Stone`s wacked-out Catherine Tramell. You just kill off Nick. But whether he returns or not, what might the story be? The weekly asked several Tinsel Town insiders for tongue-in-cheek suggestions.
Wesley Strick, who wrote ”Cape Fear” and re-wrote ”Batman Returns,”
suggests this: ”Nick and Catherine are happily married, despite Nick`s having developed leads implicating Catherine in 400 or so unsolved murders. After Nick finds an ice pick under the bed, he confronts Catherine with his suspicions. She claims she`s writing a novel about a cop who suspects his wife of committing 400 or so unsolved murders.”
”Nick believes her. Jealous of his wife`s imminent literary triumph, Nick succumbs again to cocaine and, one night, wades into the Pacific and drowns. When Catherine takes the stage to accept the Pulitzer Prize in the new Best Fiction/Best Alibi category, she proudly calls herself, `Mrs. Nick Curran.` There isn`t a dry eye in the house.”
Will Aldis, who wrote ”Stealing Home,” comes up with this: Nick is married to Catherine and is the new San Francisco police chief. New ice-pick murders take place, but Nick`s judgment ”is clouded by their terrific sex life.” He concludes the killer is Dorothy Malone and tracks her down to a warehouse where a shootout ensues. Both she and her wig fall, disclosing that she`s actually Karl Malden.
” `I killed them all! Why did you leave me? Why?` ” he whispers to Nick in a very inside joke (you`re excused for forgetting that Malden and Douglas co-starred in the 1970s TV cop series ”Streets of San Francisco”).
Then there`s Lynda Obst, producer of ”The Fisher King,” who offers this apocalyptic vision for a sequel she`d title ”Baser Instinct”: In some future time, San Francisco ”is polarized into two warring camps: psychopathic lesbians who have whimsically murdered their families, and drunken male vigilantes. When night falls, they engage in coital and homicidal skirmishes. then the final conflagration: Rich white women with perfect breasts destroy the patriarchy, and the city is cleansed by a new serenity.”
Quickly: Aug. 3 Business Week reports that, with the 1992 Summer Olympics not even halfway through, marketers of Atlanta`s 1996 games are twisting arms of corporations to cough up roughly $43 million apiece to be an ”official”
sponsor (with global marketing rights, the fee for 1992 was about $15 million). . . . Whitney Balliett crafts a fine, but almost too-brief, Rosemary Clooney profile in Aug. 3 New Yorker. . . . Both Aug. 3 Newsweek and Time covers are on AIDS, the former focusing on endangered teens and the latter on the frustration for scientists seeking a cure. Newsweek also has a good Frank Deford effort on why pro athletes should be allowed into all Olympic sports. . . . The summer Wilson Quarterly, via the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, is excellent. Students of the Soviet Union`s breakup should keep a four-story package on the convoluted pasts and ambiguous futures of the five Central Asian republics. They`re all rich in history but, so far, not high-quality inspection by historians. Elsewhere, well-known academic and social critic Daniel Bell verges on old fogyism but remains provocative in arguing that American life has become unduly ”specialized, professionalized, jargonized, and oftern hermetic in its focus and language.” In passing, he contends that the ”dryness” of American intellectual life is reflected in the paucity of general cultural periodicals, citing the New York Review of Books as about the only vital one going. . . . August Conde Nast Traveler`s
”Fear of Aeroflot” is droll, assuming you don`t have plans to fly the
”user-unfriendly” Russian airline. Writer Gary Stoller traveled the former Soviet Union and found the airline a dirty, poorly managed, autocratic mess.
