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Thursday, August 07, 2008

Kenneth Johnson is making V into a big-screen feature?!

That's what Ain't It Cool News is reporting today. The guys at Latino Film Review seem to have gotten their hands on the proposal script, and it reads like a combo of the two miniseries (minus that "Starchild" crap, well let's hope it's not in it anyway).

Even if this specific project never gets made, I don't care. I'm just glad to hear that there is some movement afoot to bring V back to the screen.

Hopefully as a re-imagined and updated story, but maintaining the same basic premise. With Kenneth Johnson given complete control over it. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if NBC had let him run V the way he intended, it would have become something truly monumental. V, the original 1983 miniseries, is still considered one of the most memorable achievements of that decade's television.

And there's been no better time to resurrect V than now. If the new Battlestar Galactica can soar, a new V would practically become a license to print money for whatever studio produces it.

I just have one request to Johnson and the other powers-that-be. If and when V gets relaunched, please, please include an adaptation of the final scene from Part 1 of the original V miniseries. 'Cuz a quarter-century later I still feel a lump in my throat when I see Abraham, the elderly Jewish man wonderfully played by Leonard Cimino, admonishing those kids...

"No! If you're going to do it, do it right. I'll show you."

(Abraham guides the teen's hand as he spray-paints a blood-red "V" on the Visitor poster)

"You understand? For VICTORY! Go tell your friends."

If they include an update for that scene that's just as powerful as the original, I swear that I will see V five times on opening day.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Chris did you know that Leonard Cimino is a real concentration camp survivor? The tatooed numbers on his arm weren't made up. They were put there by the Nazis when he was a prisoner. I want them to include him in a new V. They should give him a new character to play and have him repeat this scene.

Rich

Chris Knight said...

I did not know that, that Cimino was a Holocaust survivor. Wow! That scene where he tells his son how they must hide the Maxwell family, "or else we haven't learned a thing", that always seemed so emotional and emphatic. Almost like this was coming from a man who had *been* through something like that. And now, turns out that he had.

What perfect casting.

And I'm with you Rich: Cimino needs to be brought back and do that scene again. Abraham was killed 'course, but they could cast him as a rabbi who remembers the stories of what his people went through, and that there was resistance to the Nazis, and from that he gives the people of his own day the one thing that they need most: a symbol around which to coalesce.

Yes, YES bring back Cimino to do the "V" symbol scene again!!!