In today’s episode of The Discourse, host Mike DeAngelo puts on his “investigative reporter of some repute” hat and talks about Miramax’s latest release, “Confess, Fletch,” with the director Greg Mottola (“Superbad,” “Adventureland”) and star Jon Hamm (“Mad Men,” “Top Gun: Maverick”). In the film, Fletch (Hamm) finds himself as the prime suspect in a murder investigation, requiring him to revive his own investigative skills in order to track down the real murderer and his new girlfriend’s art collection.
During the chat, Hamm discussed how they got the project off the ground when so many before them had failed miserably to do so.
“I remember hearing Jason Sudekis was going to do it and Ryan Reynolds – fill in the blank, Kevin Smith and that whole crowd,” Hamm said. “I think the problem that people ran into was the 800-pound gorilla in the room of the original film. The idea of rebooting didn’t exist, either – until relatively recently. And when you were talking about releasing a film in only a theatrical release, other factors had to be understood and worked into the equation. So, all those things that business people think about, but I don’t think the creatives necessarily conspire to hinder the process, to my great amusement and happiness. Because none of them ever got made, and a couple of years ago, Bill Block at Miramax was like, ‘You know, we have the rights to all of the “Fletch” books. We think you’d be great for it.’ And I said, ‘I think you are a very smart man!”
And, thus, a hilarious, satisfying “Fletch” reboot was born. But should they involve Chevy Chase, the man who made Fletch a household name in the ’80s? Well, that answer is a bit complicated.
“I was tempted [to include Chase].” Mottola shared. “Because I loved Chevy. My parents let me watch SNL the first season even though I was eight years old…he was a huge hero to me, and, in fact, the second movie I was going to do, after I did my first little indie film, I cast Chevy in it. He was going to play a major role, and then the whole thing fell apart. I was so bummed, particularly that I didn’t get to work with him. So, I was tempted, but at the end of the day, we felt like we didn’t want to make a nostalgia piece. We felt like that’s a crutch, and we thought that will just remind people of something different and, you know, we wanted to pay respect to the original because we love it, but we thought ‘there’s been a million Philip Marlowes, why can’t there be more than one Fletch?’”
“Confess, Fletch” will be released in theaters and on VOD on September 16th. You can listen to the entire conversation below:
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