A Star is Born with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga is at least the fourth remake of the story.
- the 1937 original drama starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March
- adapted in 1954 as a musical starring Judy Garland and James Mason
- 1976 remake 1976 starring Barbra Streisand & Kris Kristofferson
I actually saw that when it aired on tv...gonna have to see if I can find it streaming somewhere.Originally Posted by JSGlock34
Never heard of LA Takedown before. Heat seems to be basically a scene for scene, line by line remake. Fascinating.
Wow, Michael Mann wrote and directed both of them...
Per IMBD this is an intentional remake:
This was originally meant to be a pilot for a new television series, but it never materialized, so Michael Mann remade the movie into Heat (1995). However, eventually, Mann did create a series inspired by this, called Robbery Homicide Division (2002).
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Michael Mann was glad he made L.A. Takedown (1989) because it helped to serve as a prototype for Heat (1995) and gave him the chance to see what worked and what didn't work, to play around with it, and to get deeper into it. He never planned on the TV film being a prototype, but it ended up being that way and it helped Mann to get "Heat" the way he wanted it.
Last edited by Zincwarrior; 08-15-2019 at 04:14 PM.
We touched a little on this in The Films of Michael Mann thread...Mann has been willing to return to prior projects a few times in his career. There is a lot of Thief in Heat as well...you can really see how Heat was built on the foundation of his earlier works (but most directly on LA Takedown). You also saw Mann return for the reboot of Miami Vice in 2006 (which I think has held up better than most gave it credit for when it was initially released).
Robbery Homicide Division was unfortunately cancelled before it found an audience; interestingly it starred Tom Sizemore, who was played one of the members of the bank robbery crew in Heat, as the lead detective. Really too bad - it had style.
Last edited by JSGlock34; 08-15-2019 at 05:23 PM.
"When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man."
Ok I'm just gonna say it. You're not a real Heat fan if you've never heard of LA Takedown or you didn't know it was the same movie.
I thought I was a real Heat fan...then I discovered this guy, who is obsessed.
One Heat Minute Podcast
"When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man."
Pretty much all movies are just retelling of stories and those are just retellings of fables.
If you dissect far enough anything is a “remake”, because they didn’t invent a new language to produce the film, and language is effectively a series of stolen grammar and borrowed words.
It’s the blatant ones that are the most annoying. Like seriously - can we stop with the fucking Spiderman reboots? I can only watch Peter Parker be bit by a radioactive spider so many times.
Whereas - to me the more interesting ones are the ones separated by decades. For instance The Fast and the Furious (2001) is actually a partial remake of The Fast and the Furious (1955). They don’t share much, except for illegal acts, being chased by the cops, and a final scenes that are almost the same, but with reversed endings.
So my avatar is Darwyn Cooke's rendering of the character Parker, who appeared in nearly 30 novels by Donald Westlake (under the pseudonym of Richard Stark), between 1962 and 2008. There are seven movies based on Parker novels, but only the final film, the eponymous Parker starring Jason Statham, actually used the name "Parker" for the main character, so most people don't realize that these are all about the same main character.
The first Parker novel, The Hunter, was released as Point Blank in 1967, starring Lee Marvin as "Walker". 22 years later it was remade as Payback, starring Mel Gibson as "Porter". As an aside, there are two versions of Payback, the theatrical version and the "Straight Up" Director's Cut that was originally filmed by Brian Helgeland before it was significantly recut and refilmed with a number of added scenes. The latter is much more faithful to the book.
Other "Parker" films include The Outfit, Slayground, and The Split.
"When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man."
Yeah I can't compete with that, my wife thinks I'm a weirdo for owning it on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and Amazon. Now I can show her this guy and his 170 episode podcast. Starting next week I'm gonna listen to it while I'm working.
Last edited by Casual Friday; 08-15-2019 at 09:21 PM.
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