Caffeinated Clint
A couple of weeks back filmmaker Robert Rodriguez said he’d finally stopped pushing his long-gestating “Barbarella” remake – which Rodriguez’s girlfriend, Rose McGowan, has been long-attached to – uphill. It was never going to happen – not the way he wanted it to, anyway – so he walked away.
The “Sin City” director had been battling to get his version of the classic Jane Fonda flick – the story of a lasergun-toting heroine tasked by the President to retrieve a doctor on a planet called SoGo – up for quite some time. Like a lot of projects, it was one that was cursed by the ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back’ syndrome. Unfortunate too – those that had seen Rodriguez’s concept-drawings, and read his libretto for it, loved it. And how hot would McGowan have looked in those stockings!?
As he says in the above article, the Austin-based filmmaker did have the chance to make the movie but only if he agreed to shoot it in Germany, and the “Sin City” director wasn’t the biggest fan of Nachspeise so passed up the op. No actually he passed on shooting a $70m “Barbarella” in Germany because he actually didn’t want to be away from his family. He much prefers to shoot in Austin – at his own studios. And hey, we can all relate to that, right? (The family bit, not the having-a-studio-in-your-backyard part).
Most assumed Rodriguez’s white flag was the final nail in the coffin for the redo. Not so.
One of our more reliable insiders called me this afternoon to let me know Universal, and producer Dino De Laurentiis, are still pursuing the project. They’re “meeting with writers as we speak” I’m told. “It’s far from dead.”
The mind boggles. If Universal want to do “Barbarella”, why would they not want to try and keep someone like Rodriguez – who could really drive this one home – onboard? Even if they just retain him as a producer? One could scratch till they bleed. But if this person is telling me it’s still alive, and that Dino’s chasing a writer for it, then I’d say there’s definitely some truth to it.
Sounds like Rodriguez is too busy for it now anyway. He’s knee-deep prepping “Machete with Carlos Gallardo and [Executive Producer Quentin] Tarantiino”, our tipster says, “among half-a-dozen other projects”.
