Circa 2008 or even further back (c’mon interwebs why you fail?!) David Gordon Green confirmed he was writing a remake of the 1982 Kenny Rogers movie, “Six Pack” that also starred Diane Lane and Anthony Michael Hall.
Pajiba is now reporting that Green is no longer a director on the project, but truthfully that’s old information.
“We wrote this movie called “Burnin’ Rubber,” we had a summer to kill so we just wrote it,” Green said about the collaborative screenplay he wrote with buddy Barlow Jacobs (the Green-orbiting projects, “Great World of Sound” and “Shotgun Stories” which he produced).
“And then we went to sell [the script we wrote].” Green told audiences at SXSW at a panel we attended earlier this year. “And Fox called and said, ‘we love the script, but would you rewrite it to be a remake of ‘Six Pack’ rather than make it an original thing? It was the weirdest thing because…has anybody here even seen ‘Six Pack’? It’s not a huge franchise that to me would be very valuable. I guess? They still wanted the urban spin on it, and keep a lot of the same engineering of it and but basically took our original script and have us make it more derivative of that. They’re trying to find a director for it now. Fox is trying to make it.”
And indeed Fox is trying to make it, and they’re moving forward. John Coveny and Hunt Baldwin— writer/producers of “The Closer,” and McG’s 2002 TV series “Fastlane” — have evidently come aboard to pen the script and while Green is staying on as a producer, the project look like it’s moving in a totally different direction. The new director, for now, is Tom Dey (“Marmaduke”, “Failure to Launch”) and offered to star? None other than “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” man Kevin James.
Yes, this will probably be as far away from the original idea as possible (Pajiba correctly notes that Green’s version could have been something akin to Richard Linklater’s enjoyable 2005 remake of “The Bad News Bears,” alas).
So what would have Green’s version looked like? Truthfully that’s more interesting to us. “[‘Six Pack’] was a childhood favorite of mine, it was a race car movie and I wrote a remake of it. My buddy [Jacobs] was living in the neighborhood, African American, low-income families in New Orleans and these kids loved NASCAR, and would talk about it all the time and I thought that was badass.”
“And I just love things that aren’t expected and are things that are different from what you’d expect from the clichés and stereotypes of the world, it was refreshing. So Barlow had this idea and we wrote this kids NASCAR movie and we always talked about ‘Six Pack’ as an inspiration or an influence even though it was very similar to that, but it kinda was. Sort of a crossroads of kids, but we wanted to engineer it more for the kids in our neighborhood and make it more of a redneck shitkicker, it was supposed to be a family movie, but with more of an urban edge to it.”
Green clearly likes kids films (arguably “George Washington” is his lyrical take on that subject), and he also once heavily campaigned to direct “Fat Albert” — no really — but he never got the gig, obviously.
Here’s the original trailer for “Six Pack.” Now imagine something totally different and probably unfunny. At SXSW Green also talked about his upcoming medieval stoner film, “Your Highness,” his potential remake of the Italian horror classic, “Suspiria” and his next picture which shoots in the fall, “The Sitter” starring Jonah Hill.
