Badmovies.org Forum

Obviously inspired by the old ads you couldn't do today thread I'm asking about old movies you could not make today.

I'll start with the oscar winning movie "The French Connection", that brought gene hackman an oscar for a character that now would be considered intolerable to american movie audiences.

Blazing Saddles.   I own the 30th anniversary edition and Mel Brooks and all the other producers say it could never be made now.

Hell, on American TV they even edit out the fart sounds in the campfire scene.

Blazing Saddles was the first one I thought of too.  It might be a stretch but I also think you couldn't make Gone with the Wind today. Not because of budgets or societal norms but because the leads were just too perfect in that movie. Robbie Pattinson and Kate Hudson just wouldn't cut it. I would say the same for Casablanca.

Okay, thanks for making me almost vomit trying to picture Pattinson and Hudson in Gone With the Wind. You are a terrible person.

 :wink:

The 1980 film Arthur with Dudly Moore was recently remade with Russell Brand. I loved the original, and I have no intention of seeing the remake, although I have no problem with Russell Brand. But from the trailers I've seen of the remake, it looks like they've taken out the excessive drinking aspect of the character, and I'm not surprised. The original Arthur is almost taboo now. The last time I looked at comments on IMDB about it, half of them were about how drinking is not funny and how a comedy about an alcoholic is just not cool. Whatever. I can't stand puritanical attitudes.

Many, many films would have to go total racial makeovers if anyone ever decided to do a remake:

CHECK AND DOUBLE CHECK (1930) starring blackfaced Amos and Andy
THE MASK OF FU MANCHU (1932) or any of those 'Yellow Peril' movies
Most older Westerns featuring wild Injuns, the kind you can kill 20 of with one shot.

Would anyone ever even try to make these today?

That's a great example. I loved the original and will probably skip the remake, too. I understand one of the conditions of Arthur's inheritance is he gets clean and sober, which I'm sure he does in a very dramatic and touching montage.

IO9 did a great article likening Gone with the Wind to a post-apocalyptic story - that's a movie I'd pay to see.

Well, there's another reason you can't make Gone With the Wind that I'm surprised nobody is mentioning. Having slaves that are loyal to the South and happy to be slaves is something you can't get away with in today's climate. Maybe those things happened historically, maybe they didn't. I'm not taking a stance either way. I just know there's no way depicting such a thing on screen would fly these days.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers from 1954.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Brides_for_Seven_Brothers_(film)#Plot

Most of the big budget musicals and Fred Astaire vehicles.  People don't find that sort of stuff entertaining.  Those folks had real talents, but its not anything we appriciate these days.
-Ed

I suppose you could make a BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) type film today, but you'd have to tone down the 'Heroic Ku Klux Klan' business a bit...

Just about any old movie where all the black characters were butlers, maids or train conductors.

I don't see why. We shouldn't shy away from history - if a movie is set in a particular time period then its characters should reflect the attitudes of that time. If that means relegating black characters to subservient roles, so be it; it would be jarring to watch a film set during racial segregation where tensions and atitudes between races are completely ignored. What if you saw a WWII flick with Nazis played by a mix of races? The anachronism would stick out like a sore thumb and potentially ruin the movie.

That brings up another point. While not movies in and of themselves, the old series of Little Rascas shorts couldn't be re-done because of the stuff with Stymie and Buckwheat. There were a lot of sight gags and phrases that was really politically incorrect.

A few of them I can think of now were Birthday Blues,  Shiver Me Timbers and the not-so PC king of them all, The Kid From Borneo, with Bumbo the wild man.   And aside from this stuff, these 3 episodes were truly hilarious.

That, and some of the old Three Stooges stuff too, that starred Dudley Dickerson most of the time.

in society's defnse, there is probably alot more things you can make today that you couldn't then.

Yeh...like some s**t and p**s porn. Just because it can be done-don't make it worth seeing.
You can't make a drive in movie...a z-budget movie-that will play theaters. Ultra low budget crap goes straight to video. You won't see the equivelent of stuff like MAD DOCTOR of BLOOD ISLAND or The BRAIN from PLANET AROUS playing at a theater near you. Mebbe on Sy-Fy chaneel (I hate that-sy fy-WTF is that??? Tampering with Forry's term!-but no movie theaters. That being said...

You'll never see cartoons like this....


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7cvsh2iIwQ&feature=related

Cannibal Holocaust type of movies involving real animal cruelty. I doubt any filmmaker would wanna do animal snuff today unless it happens to be some obscure underground direct-to-DVD production.

The Sentinel (1977). Director Michael Winner casting people with Birth defects for exploitative shock value back then. I doubt a big studio would allow this today. Maybe Troma would though.

Except that's not how you'd do it today. Production methods have changed, special effects are much better and cheaper to produce - remaking a movie today doesn't necessarily restrict you to only using what they were capable of in the original year of release. If we're going to start making that restriction you may as well say you couldn't make the vast majority of old movies today because they actors that were in them are dead!  :teddyr:

Todd Browning's FREAKS probably wouldn't pass muster today.

I had it disabled a few years back. At the time it seemed like a competition. I just wanted to have fun.

This was something of a fad in the 70s. THE SENTINEL, MUTATIONS aka FREAKMAKER, SSSSSSS, and SISTERS all used "Living, Breathing Freaks!" in their casts. Sealo the Seal Boy was in all of them, I think.

THE TERROR OF TINY TOWN probably wouldn't get the green light today.

Able Gance's J'ACCUSE! (1938) was also pretty disturbing. Gance used real French WWI vets with horrendous facial injuries as the army of ghosts of past wars that marches on the countryside.

There was actually a term for these soldiers, but I can't recall it offhand.

I never said anything about restrictions, I only said that I "doubt" filmmakers would actually slaughter real animals on screen these days fore pure shock value. Sure they could use advanced special effects but the results just wouldn't be the same (no pun intended).

Show's over folks, this is the winner.

Spielen wir Liebe (1977) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076749/) could not be made today anywhere anyhow. When even Europe is banning your film as too obscene, it's too obscene.