Sometimes the news writes your story for you. With Hollywood still feeling the crunch of the WGA strike for next summer’s film season, The Bad and Ugly is pitching news stories as films.
Ideas go to the highest bidder!
The Story: Very simple. A woman comes home to discover a man with a claw hammer waiting to kill her. After a struggle, she strangles the man to death in self defense.
Only to learn that the man she killed was a hitman hired by her husband.
Simply: woman kills hitman hired by husband.
Title of the Film: HitWife
Tagline: “Till Death Do They Part” or “Her Husband Missed The Mark.”
Starring: Diane Keaton as the wife who strangles a hitman played by Sean William Scott, hired by her husband Al Pacino, because he’ll mostly yell his way through the part anyway.
The Plot: Diane Keaton plays Susan Kuhnhausen, in the middle of a messy divorce with her husband, Al Pancio.
The film starts with Sean William Scott deciding to become a hitman after getting out of jail for good behavior. He looks at guns at the local sporting goods store and fantasizes about becoming a hired killer.
Al Pacino, meanwhile seems to have lost his mob connections and is losing ground in the divorce proceedings to his soon-to-be-ex-wife.
Keaton is basically playing Diane Keaton of late, discovering the idiosyncratic nature of being a newly-single woman in the twilight of her life. Insert side plots from Something’s Gotta Give, The Family Stone, Town and Country.
Pacino meets Scott through an online ad for contract killers. Pancino’s a bad-ass, but is unable to sniff out Scott’s complex farce. He hires Scott, but Scott only has a hammer.
Once Keaton kills Scott in her home, Pacino goes inot hiding, convinced he needs to kill his wife himself.
The Twist: The beginning of the film plays out like an indie crime drama, however, as soon as Pacino goes on the hunt and Keaton’s inner woman is given superpowers (when she realizes she can kill a man), the film becomes a lot like the First Wives Club, but if the First Wives were all about killing their ex-husbands.
Why It Will Work: The film buffs will show up hoping for a gritty crime drama, or they will just pay the price to see Pacino and Keaton get into the fight everyone has wanted to see them have since Godfather Part II. The teens will show up for Sean William Scott and the women will show up for the empowerment issue.
Make the film for a slim $11 million dollars, dump it in late October. Women will love to see something that isn’t 100% gore in that time period and maybe - just maybe - you could hold over for Oscar bait.
