The Hollywood Reporter demonstrates some lazy reporting (i.e. just rewriting the press release) by not pointing out that the novel is, in fact, a sequel to DEATH WISH using the Paul Kersey character. I suppose a film adaptation would not technically be a remake of DEATH WISH, but, yeah, it basically is.

SAW director sentenced to DEATH

Who in this current generation has the chops the play Paul Kersey? I nominate Justin Timberlake.

Bronson was 53 when he made Death Wish, so maybe they won't go for a pretty-boy like Timberlake. Nowadays who in NY has kids until their 40's, anyway? I'm just glad they're remaking it before Dick Wolf got his hands on it and made LAW AND ORDER: DEATH WISH.
I nominate James Woods, who at 59 could still go all Max Renn on muggers and rapists. And because 59 is the new 53.

My money is they'll go with someone half that age...maybe Vin Diesel or The Rock.

Or LL Cool J.

Has anyone ever seen the Fat Charles Durning DEATH WISH ripoff STAND ALONE?

I'd nominate Tom Skerritt for this, if he hadn't already done his own DEATH WISH ripoff FIGHTING BACK.

Okay, if I had to be serious I would suggest Tim Thomerson but he isn't mainstream enough to win the role. If I had to go mainstream, I would say Viggo Mortenson.

Back in 1974, I felt that Charles Bronson was miscast for the simple reason that no New York mugger would bother a guy who looked like that. I always thought they should have cast someone like Jack Lemmon or Tony Randall, someone for whom using a gun to shoot somebody for the first time would be a shock--to both the character and the audience.

So, using that reasoning for casting a remake, I'd say it was time for Jason Alexander to reinvent himself as an action star.

I'd rather see Albert Brooks, personally. But point taken.
It would also be interesting to cast someone with well-known liberal credentials like Sean Penn or Tim Robbins. Then they could call it Straw Dogs.
Most interesting, assuming they set in in the present, will be seeing how they plan on justifying his behavior, since crime rates are at historic lows across the city.

I don't know what he's doing now but I'd cast Bernard Goetz...

I think he already made his version of DEATH WISH. Co-starring Al Sharpton. Now if they could get those two back together for a sequel...that I'd like to see. "This time it's PERSONAL!"

My money is on the Jaime Foxx, LL Cool Jr type of casting. It'll be set in the "ghetto" and have a black lead wiping out scummy drug dealers. It won't be anything like the original.

The focus groups won't want a movie starring a 40's-ish actor shooting poor people.

Hang on though, isn't Harrison Ford still doing action movies and pretending to be 40's-ish??

A DEATH WISH in NY--indeed, any kind of street crime film--really wouldn't make sense in the city as it is today, for which those of who live here can breathe a sign of relief. They'd have to stage the shootouts amidst condo projects. :)

Reality would dictate that the new film take place in the suburbs and exurbs where the meth trade and gang activity are on the rise, but this fact doesn't quite grip the public imagination as much as, say, NY muggers.

Maybe Edward Norton, scheduled for a STRAW DOGS update, could film a DEATH SENTENCE in his native Baltimore, where gang activity is fierce--but localized to poor neighborhoods, and marginalized, as headline-grabbing "street gangs terrorize middle-class homeowners" stories are as rare as they are in other major cities.

Or a 40's-ish white actor shooting black people (Black Hawk Down notwithstanding).
When I was a kid in 70's Queens NY, an actor from Death Wish named Dino Shorf came to talk with our class. He was one of the Central Park muggers (was he in the poster? I don't remember) and was articulate and funny. He talked a lot about Shakespeare & the theatre, but for us brats, anyone who got gunned down by Charles Bronson was royalty.

Sorry to say but that is a real disgrace.... No actor in this world could possibly replace Charles Bronson...Stop those damn remakes!

Yeah, I always felt Bronson wasn't the best choice for Kersey. Here's a long but revealing letter from Brian Garfield, the author of DEATH WISH, sent to a fan working on a DEATH WISH tribute website...

Thanks for your flattering interest in "Death Wish". I'm not sure it's entirely deserved, but it's appreciated.

To try to answer your questions. . . .

1) I didn't set out to write about vigilantism. I set out to write a story about an ordinary man who's traumatized not so much by crime as by his reaction to a crime.

I'd been the victim of a trivial crime -- some vandal had slashed the canvas roof of my car to shreds and it was the middle of the night and I had a freezing-cold two-hour drive in a snowstorm and by the time I got home I was half-crazed with fury. Wanted to turn around, drive back into New York, get my hands on the vandal and strangle him. "I'll kill that son of a bitch!"

After I got home and thawed out, it occurred to me that the son of a bitch had cut the tough canvas car-top to ribbons and therefore obviously he had a big sharp knife and therefore it probably was a good thing I hadn't tried to catch him.

But then, being a writer who kept myself attuned to premises for stories, I couldn't help speculating about what would happen if a fellow got mad -- the way I'd got mad, that freezing winter night -- and then never came out of it. Instead of calming down, what if he became consumed by an obsession about it?

That's as near as I can come to explaining the genesis of the story.

2) The main character's name was changed from Paul Benjamin (in my novel) to Paul Kersey (in the movie) for a mundane reason: there was an American stage, film and tv character-actor named Paul Benjamin. I didn't know that when I wrote the book -- didn't know the actor or his work. I've seen him since then, and he's a very good actor. For the book, though, I just picked the name at random because it sounded like the sort of name this character should have. The original producers of the film were thinking the real Paul Benjamin would be a good choice to play one of the police detectives (the role that ended up being played by the excellent but under-rated actor Jack Wallace). So the producers asked Wendell Mayes to change the character's name in the screenplay, largely to avoid confusing the issue for the actor whose name actually was Paul Benjamin.

3) I think the screenplay was excellent. I had suggested to the producers (Hal Landers and Bobby Roberts) that they employ Wendell Mayes to write it. Mayes, whom I knew slightly, was a superb screenwriter (his other films included "Anatomy of a Murder" and "Advise and Consent"). They all kept me "in the loop" as the screenplay was written, but I offered no input because Mayes didn't need any. He knew what he was doing.

I was not on the set during the filming. This was a matter of mutual preference. Michael Winner and I are not each other's favorite person.

The picture that was filmed was not the picture that the producers or Mayes or I had had in mind. Landers and Roberts were thoughtful gents and sophisticated filmmakers -- they'd produced "Monte Walsh", "The Gypsy Moths" and "The Hot Rock", among other movies. They'd bought two novels from me, and asked me which of the two I'd like to screenwrite. I hadn't written many screenplays and was daunted by the idea of trying to make a movie scenario out of "Death Wish" because the book is a sort of interior monologue -- much of it takes place inside the character's thoughts and feelings, and I wasn't confident I could translate that for the screen. So I picked the easier choice and wrote the other film. (It was made a few years later as a tv-movie, "Relentless".) It was Wendell Mayes who -- brilliantly -- made the "Death Wish" screenplay work by building up the role of the antagonist, the police detective played in the film by Vincent Gardenia -- a character who barely appears at all in the novel.

Once Mayes' screenplay was completed, Landers and Roberts attempted to set up a "package" for the film. At one point it consisted of Sidney Lumet, to direct the movie (in black-and-white), Jack Lemmon to star as Paul Kersey, and Henry Fonda as the police detective.

As you can imagne, that would have been quite a different movie from what ended up on the screen.

A series of events conspired. Landers and Roberts got caught in a "cash bind" and were forced to raise money by selling off several properties they owned. Simultaneously and coincidentally, Dino Di Laurentiis was just moving his business from Rome to New York. He was looking for films that were "ready to go" -- i.e., completed screenplays that could be filmed quickly. He was impatient to get into the American marketplace. The first two projects he bought were "Death Wish" and "Serpico." I'd worked with Frank Serpico too, as it happened, so I felt as if I had a bit of interest in that movie. Sidney Lumet had already agreed to direct that one. (It turned out to be an excellent film.) That left "Death Wish" without a director. Without Lumet, neither Jack Lemmon nor Henry Fonda wanted to proceed. Dino did not care to wait for them all to become available again. He'd produced a number of action movies in Italy and Spain -- some of them (like "Chato's Land") had involved Charles Bronson and Michael Winner. Dino knew that Michael Winner could be depended on to deliver a movie quickly. Winner asked Bronson aboard. I believe Bronson was one of the few people who actually liked working with Winner.

My feelings about Bronson are mixed. He was a highly effective screen presence, and could be a fairly good actor ("The Great Escape", "The Magnificent Seven", "Rider on the Rain", "The Mechanic"). In "Death Wish" -- this is purely my opinion and obviously is not widely shared -- he was atrociously miscast. Commercially I'm wrong, of course, because the movie sold tons of tickets and stirred up hurricanes of emotional responses.

That was unintentional. I mean by this, NOBODY intended it to have those effects. They took us all by surprise.

Here's why I believe Bronson was miscast. The story is about an ordinary city man who describes himself as a flabby do-gooder. Eventually he turns into an avenging lunatic. But as soon as you see Bronson on the screen, you KNOW he's going to start killing people. There is no visible change in the character. Furthermore, let's face it -- would YOU mug Charlie Bronson?

Therefore, in my opinion the movie is not believable, and it makes no point except to justify rage and to glorify vigilantism. These are not, in my opinion, worthy or sensible goals.

The original idea, in both the novel and Wendell Mayes' screenplay, was to show the slow disintegration of an ordinary man who is overcome by a compulsion. By the end of the novel, Paul is shooting unarmed teen-agers simply because he doesn't like the way they look. Vigilantism is not a solution; it's a problem. As soon as Winner and Bronson came into the picture, all that changed. Bronson wanted to be a cowboy-style hero and Winner wanted to make that kind of movie. They ended up using the screenplay (their only changes were the self-indulgent Hawaiian beach opening scene, and the ending, which is not drastically altered but the emphasis is changed by the grin on Bronson's face when he cocks his finger at the mugger). They -- Di Laurentiis and Winner and Bronson -- filmed it in such a way that it turned into a Charles Bronson Western that happened to be re-set in the streets of New York. I thought it was an effective but very bad movie. It's sloppy as hell -- in some shots you can see the microphone boom hanging down into the picture, and Winner is an unsubtle clumsy director. Here and there he had whimsical ideas about moviemaking, but they weren't nearly enough to give the film any polish. I noticed, in the rough-cut of the film, that he had various scenes in which three black-habit-clad nuns walked across the background of a shot. None of these scenes was related. You couldn't tell whether they were the same three nuns, or three different nuns. They just appear, wander across the background of a shot, and are not noticed by anybody. I asked Michael Winner what this was all about. He said, "They're symbols, dear boy." I said, "Symbols of what?" He gave me a reproachful look. "Nothing. They're symbols, that's all."

Yes. Well.

4) Personally I feel all four sequel movies are rancid. They are as contemptible and deable as movies can be. Badly written, badly directed, badly acted. They have no redeeming features unless you count sadism as a redemption.

There was a piece recently in the Chicago Tribune about a local theatre whose troupe singled out "Death Wish 3" as one of the worst screenplays of all time, so they staged a parody of it. I didn't see the parody but wish I had -- am told it was very funny.

5) From time to time, inquiries arise about doing a remake of the original "Death Wish". Personally I'd like to see it done -- done right, for a change. But the issue is clouded because ownership of the rights is not clear. The original movie was produced by Dino di Laurentiis and released by Paramount. But Dino and I agreed to sell our (separate) sequel rights to Cannon Films. Cannon's chief executive, Menahem Golan, produced all four sequels, under various company names. I think all his companies eventually went bankrupt; I suspect they were designed to go bankrupt, perhaps leaving creditors holding empty bags while Golan trotted off somewhere with the money. Dino and I got paid for each movie, but we had to sue Golan or threaten to sue Golan all four times. The movie business is slippery and not very aboveboard. None of the four companies that filmed "Death Wishes" 2, 3, 4 and 5 is still alive. Neither is Charles Bronson. I think Michael Winner is still around, but the director of the last two sequels -- J. Lee Thompson -- died some years ago. (He had a good career, with "The Guns of Navarone" and other movies, but it dwindled away over the years -- allegedly in whiskey -- and he ended up making hack potboilers like the DW sequels.)

Some of the Golan companies' assets were foreclosed by the Credit Lyonnais Bank. In turn, that division of Credit Lyonnais went bankrupt.

After various foreclosures, most of the sequel film rights now seem to belong (don't ask me how) to Sony-MGM-Columbia Pictures, and the rest belong to me. No one cares to spend a fortune on lawyers and litigation to clarify the status of the rights that probably belong to Sony. If that company decides to do a remake, I'll be happy to cooperate, under certain terms that I hadn't earned in 1974 but have earned now. All that seems beside the point, however, because Sony doesn't seem interested in resurrecting the title and I doubt anyone else can obtain the rights, in the prevailing dog-in-the-manger atmosphere of the movie industry.

"Death Sentence", my second novel about the same character, was not filmed as part of the "Death Wish" series. It was considered and it was declined, so it became free for me to sell elsewhere. It's now been bought for filming by Hyde Park Productions and Baldwin Entertainment. I've completed the screenplay and the producers are casting. I hope they'll do a good job. The Baldwins are the same producers who recently made the movie "Ray" (about Ray Charles); like Landers and Roberts, they have a sense of quality.

We've updated the story and the characters -- they are not recognizably identifiable with the original "Death Wish" and nobody is likely to confuse the new film with any of the old ones, but I hope it'll be completed and I hope it'll make its point.

And I hope this answers your questions. Good luck to you. What's the address of your forthcoming website?

Best,

-- Brian Garfield

Fascinating...thanks for posting that.

Speaking of Brian Garfield, I wonder if there will ever be a DVD release of the western miniseries he wrote, WILD TIMES, with Sam Elliott and Dennis Hopper. It was directed by Richard Compton, who did MACON COUNTY LINE, and I think Fox owns it now from their Metromedia acquisition. It was made for TV, but shown in theatres in Europe, so it may have even been framed for a widescreen ratio.