the diary of anne frank Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Not too long ago, we learned that David Mamet and Disney were coming together for a new take on The Diary of Anne Frank. The project was said to merge Frank's famous diary with the Tony Award-winning stage production and Mamet's own spin as -- believe it or not -- a "coming of age" story. Mamet + Disney + Frank -- it sounded too strange to be real, and it looks like Disney agrees.

Just over a month later, The Wrap reports that the project has been thrown into turnaround. It seems that this wasn't exactly a film about Frank (thank god), but rather "a pro-Israel exploration of anti-Semitism set in contemporary times," about "a contemporary Jewish girl who goes to Israel and learns about the traumas of suicide bombing." According to sources, Disney said the spin was "too dark." (One can only wonder why it took Disney a month to come to this realization when we all suspected it from the beginning.) One executive said: "It's very intense, and dark and scary. It's not a film version of The Diary of Anne Frank."

That begs the question: Why frakking call it The Diary of Anne Frank if it's not about her? If the film is set in modern times, and not about Anne Frank hiding out during WWII, why not call it something else? Why capitalize on one dead girl's name? And while we're on the topic -- why did Disney pick this to begin with? Did they think Mamet would have Anne tiptoeing through the tulips and singing "fa-la-la"?

In perhaps the most oddly juxtaposed match of artist and material since David Lynch gave us The Straight Story, acclaimed playwright and screenwriter David Mamet has signed on to write and direct his own version of the story of Anne Frank.

You read that right -- the man behind Oleanna is taking on the tale of the Jewish teenager who hid in an Amsterdam attic during the Holocaust before dying at 15, and on behalf of Disney no less. According to Variety, Mamet's interpretation will combine elements of Frank's renown diary, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett's Tony Award-winning stage adaptation, and whatever Mamet brings to the table that, in the trade's words, "could reframe the story as a young girl's right of passage."

I'm really not sure what to make of this myself. The man has certainly proven a gift with dialogue and direction on both screen and stage, but I can't say that I've seen a film of this that suggests that he might be ideal to bring Anne Frank's life back to, well, life. Maybe he'll go for something more abstract along the lines of I'm Not There; the best any of us can do now is just wait and see how this plays out.

Oscar-winning actress Shelley Winters died today at the age of 85 of heart failure, after being hospitalized for a heart attack in October. Winters won Oscars in 1959 for The Diary of Anne Frank, and in 1965 for A Patch of Blue, in which she played a mother who tries to end her blind daughter's friendship with a black man, played by Sidney Poitier. During Winters' long career, she evolved from a buxom sexpot to a serious dramatic actress. She was a devotee of The Actors Studio, and constantly challenged herself to find new ways to perform and reinvent herself. She continued working into her 70s, playing Roseanne's grandmother in a recurring role on the television show Roseanne in the 1990s.

The first time I knew of Winters was when she played the evil Lena Gogan in Pete's Dragon in 1977. My grandmother took me to that film, and I remember her expressing her shock at how Winters had changed. I didn't believe her when she said Winters had been known as a sex symbol, and so after the movie, my grandmother pulled out her photo albums of herself as a teenage chorus line dancer, so I could understand how people age and change. Shelley Winters represented my first childhood understanding that someday I would grow old; later in life, as she continued to act and challenge herself in new ways, she came to represent to me resilience in the face of change. She never stopped working and trying new things and starting from where she was at each point of her life to explore what she could do. She wrote several "tell all" books about Hollywood that ticked some people off too - she was never afraid to speak up and say what she thought, even if it meant offending people.