I think it could be done if…
a) The actor and creative team were Asian;
b) They were clearly motivated by affection for the character more than a desire to exploit yet another recognizable name for quick Reboot Bux; and
c) The movie was actually any damn good.
That last one is the hardest to achieve. The movie would need to be somebody’s vision, not a corporate assignment.
And no genderswaps. Those never work. Just write good female characters.
I’ve read the books and they’re pretty racist.
My advice would be to just invent your own Asian detective and leave Chan out of it.
Well, actually, Murder She Wrote was a genderswapped Ellery Queen, so sometimes they do.
Similarly, in the play that was the basis for His Girl Friday, Hildy was a man.
This. There’s probably plenty of worthy literary and/or pop works that could be promoted and brought to light instead.
I actually think casting Lucy Liu was pretty smart, because it was a swift clensing of the property stating “This aint THAT Charlie Chan” in one swoop.
Gender swaps can and have worked before. It just all depends on the take.
Eh, if you find yourself talking about the “property” instead of the character, then you’ve already turned it from a story into a product. Move on and do something else. If I want stories about Charlie Chan, I want stories about a version of that Charlie Chan. What’s the point if all you keep is the name?
I don’t care enough about Charlie Chan to have any real desire to see it adapted, and certainly not rebooted. But new ideas that get any sort of chance seem to be a decidedly pre-21st century phenomenon.
I didn’t mean to sidetrack the thread here, especially since the first Chan book won’t be PD until next year.
It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to reboot the character via a movie anyway. Nowadays, the only thing movie studios are interested in are “properties” they can run into the ground through a series of films. Which would inevitably lead to car chases, 'spolsions, karate fights and likely our hero locked in a death grip with the guilty murderer he just exposed as they plummet to the earth after falling out of an airplane with just one parachute between them. As Hollywood is wont to do.
But, “For what I have won, I paid the price.” – that line alone suggests a whole deeper character than we ever saw in any of those old movies. It also seems to be the fate of many super heroes.
If they could make a mystery movie which spent some time time showing us the story of that man of two cultures, who is not fully trusted or comfortable in either of them, showing us the world of 1920’s Honolulu that he lived in, showing us what drove him and how he navigated his way among Hawaii’s societies and cultures of that day. That would be a movie I’d like to see.
Or even a movie about the real life Honolulu police detective who inspired Earl Derr Biggers to create Chan – Chang Apana. Get this : “One night in Honolulu, with no backup and armed only with his bullwhip, Chang arrested 40 gamblers, whom he then lined up and marched back to the police station.”
I really want to see the crappy low budget slasher film based on Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Yeah, but I think that was the point made above. Once you’ve traveled so far, why keep your story even formally tied to one that understandably has so many negative connotations for so many people?
The “two worlds” angst isn’t even all that scandalous or unheard of in Hollywood or pop fiction. Tarzan, anyone? How about Pygmalion? Even one of the RT targets from a few years back had that covered:
Spock!
I would rather see that than the Mickey Mouse slasher movie and Mickey Mouse bloody video game we’re getting instead.
Apparently we got a new PG Wodehouse PD book (Money for Nothing). Not a Jeeves book, which is probably why it’s not mentioned in most lists.
No new H. Rider Haggard this year - there are only a couple of books left to enter PD.
The Hounds of God by Rafael Sabatini entered PD this year. Still a lot of his work left to go.
Just notes on a few of my favorite early 20th century authors. I’ll post more if I think of any.
His Girl Friday
EDIT: Someone beat me to it.
I can think of some gender-swapped characters that have worked pretty well-
Starbuck in the Battlestar Galactica reboot.
M in the James Bond series.
Watson in Elementary.
Lady M is so much better; she steals the scenes in Goldeneye
You can’t get much better than Judi Densch.
I would love to see something in 1920’s Hawai’i (basically anything 1920s that isn’t New York or Chicago would be a nice change.) And Chang Apana would be a good basis for a character. The 2010 Hawai’i Five-0 series did a throwback episode set in the 1940s that highlighted Apana and some of his cases.
I think Kansas City during the Jazz Age would be a great detective setting. You had an interesting racial mix and the racial tensions of being on the border of two states with racial issues galore with a huge flowering of art and music, especially by black people, at the same time. The restored ‘Jazz District’ in downtown KC is pretty neat. Lots of history and lots of music.
You could even incorporate Count Basie’s music into it since he started in KC.
This, but honestly: hold the detectives. Just show me the lives of the musicians. That’d be plenty interesting without the other stuff to obfuscate it.