Jon Hamm Spearheading a Reboot of Fletch

It’s been 35 years since Fletch, an adaptation of the Gregory McDonald 1974 novel, was on the big screen and 31 years since its sequel, Fletch Lives was released. After several attempts to reboot the franchise over the last thirty years –one that includes writer/director Kevin Smith- Miramax and actor Jon Hamm have announced they’re finally going to take another stab at it. 

Zev Borow will write the screenplay, which is based on the second novel, 1976’s Confess, Fletch. Daytrippers, Superbad and Adventureland director Greg Mottola will helm the film.

Still, there has been a long and typically Hollywood, road to this reboot.

Universal Pictures released the first Fletch film in 1985, starring Chevy Chase and directed by Michael Ritchie (Downhill Racer, The Candidate, Semi-Tough, Bad News Bears). It grossed nearly $60 million on an $8 million budget. However, it was not a straight take on the novel, and Ritchie allowed Chase to ad-lib, but it was a critical and box office hit and allowed McDonald to write a few more books (including a spin-off series of four books featuring Flynn, who was introduced in second book). It took four years to get a sequel out, Fletch Lives, which again starred Chase and helmed by Ritchie. However, this 1989 film was an original story, and not based on any previous McDonald material. While the $8 million budget remained, the sequel was generally disliked by critics and made about $20 million less than the first film. Still, Universal was interested in a third film, eventually agreeing in the early 1990s to let Kevin Smith write and direct a follow up still starring Chase, but nothing came to fruition.  

 

By 2000, the rights to series were acquired by Miramax after Universal Pictures option ran out. Again, Smith was on the forefront to helm a film, with Chevy Chase still attached to play Fletch. However, a disagreement between the two about the priorities on the sequel project led Smith to work on adapting Fletch Won, a 1985 prequel McDonald wrote, and was set years before the first book, thus featuring a younger version of Fletch that probably would’ve starred frequent Smith collaborator Jason Lee or even Ben Affleck. Interestingly, McDonald wrote three prequels to the original 1974 novel, with Fletch Won being chronologically first, followed by Fletch, Too in 1986 and Fletch and the Widow Bradley, which came out in 1981.

Smith would struggle getting the film greenlit, as former Miramax studio head Harvey Weinstein was not convinced Jason Lee could launch a successful film series. Over the years, Smith considered other actors to play Fletch, such as Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck (again), Jimmy Fallon and even Scrubs star Zach Braff. Eventually, Smith left the project in late 2005. After Smith dropped out, Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence was hired to helm Fletch Won and a sequel, but by 2007 it became obvious nothing was going to come out of it. While Braff was never officially attached to the project, he eventually dropped out to work on his own films and Lawrence soon followed. 

The next attempt came in 2011, when Warner Brothers acquired the rights. After several attempts by several writers to get a suitable script, the WB put the IP on ice until 2013 when David List, who represented the Estate of Gregory McDonald, stepped up with his own draft that even gotten former SNL actor Jason Sudeikies interested in the title role. The studio signed off on List’s script and the search began for a director, but by early 2015, the film had moved to Relativity Studios after Warner Bros. passed on the project –then in 2018 Relativity Media had gone bankrupt.

Miramax, once again, has gotten the rights back and is now setting up a potential new film series being spearheaded and starring Jon Hamm as Fletch. Whether this latest attempt actually gets made will be the question. Hamm is a bankable star, though mainly known for his dramatic TV work. However, with the right material, he’s also a very good comedic actor –his work on Tina Fey’s 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt proves that. But with so many fits and starts, with an ongoing pandemic,  a new Fletch film is at least two years or more away.

Books: The Fugitive Pigeon By Donald E. Westlake (1965)

“Charlie Poole is an apathetic young man who’s perfectly content to run a neighborhood bar in Canarsie, New York. The bar is owned by Charlie’s Uncle Al, who’s a mid-level gangster. Occasionally, Charlie has to hold a package at the bar for somebody until it’s picked up later, and while he suspects this has something to do with his uncle’s criminal activities, he never asks for details. He doesn’t want to know. But then late one night as he’s about to close up, two strangers come in, and Charlie quickly realizes that they’re hit men sent there to kill him. He has no idea why anybody would send killers after him, but when he manages to escape with his life, he decides that he’d better figure it out in a hurry, because the two assassins are still on his trail. This is the beginning of a whirlwind three days in which Charlie tries to find out who wants him dead and why, an investigation complicated by the fact that he has to keep dodging the two hit men. Along the way he runs into a murder (for which he’s blamed, naturally) and a beautiful young woman (for whom he falls, naturally).”

The Fugitive Pigeon was sort of a watershed moment in Donald E. Westalke’s writing career. After publishing some heavy crime fiction novels, this one became his first comic caper. According to the Westlake Review site, Pigeon started out as a serious mystery/thriller “involving a young man in a dangerous situation with organized crime, much like two of his earlier novels for Random House, and as Westlake put it, “’It’s been coming out funny.’” Told to “curb his comedic impulse” by Henry Morrison, who worked at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, due to American humor not translating well overseas, Westlake eventually ignored that advice. Lucky for him, The Fugitive Pigeon went on to outsell his previous serious-minded Random House mysteries by roughly a two-to-one margin. And thus this set up everything that came after, as he vacillated between some serious crime thrillers and some laugh-out-loud humorous capers. Also, the book was originally entitled The Dead Nephew, “but it got changed to The Fugitive Pigeon, because Lee Wright, Westlake’s talented but quirky editor at Random House, didn’t like titles with the word ‘dead’ in them.”

There is not much in the way of slapstick humor that would show up in Westlake’s later works, but The Fugitive Pigeon is still a fast paced thriller/mystery. It’s a tightly plotted, linear first-person narrative that unravels like a traditional whodunit. It’s fun, and sometimes funny, book that also marked a huge transitional shift in Westlake’s publishing career. It proved to the publishers that a writer is not always the sum of his or her parts, that they don’t have to be stuck in one genre –or for Westlake- the same genre, but could write both serious and comedic tales.

Books: Mostly Dead Things By Kristen Arnett (2019)

"One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into the family taxidermy shop to find that her father has committed suicide, right there on one of the metal tables. Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the failing business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the shop to make aggressively lewd art with the taxidermied animals. Her brother Milo withdraws, struggling to function. And Brynn, Milo’s wife—and the only person Jessa’s ever been in love with—walks out without a word. As Jessa seeks out less-than-legal ways of generating income, her mother’s art escalates—picture a figure of her dead husband and a stuffed buffalo in an uncomfortably sexual pose—and the Mortons reach a tipping point. For the first time, Jessa has no choice but to learn who these people truly are, and ultimately how she fits alongside them."

With the neon green cover, and pink Flamingo and the stylized font of the title, one can assume (as I did) that Mostly Dead Things was going to be quirky, humorous, though sometimes serious, book about a dysfunctional Florida based family. But the book really is about sad people caught up with family issues, death, and trying to cope when everything seems to falling apart. There is juxtaposition here with the detailed descriptions of taxidermy and how Morton’s family is carved up in pieces, with this merged with that.

Jessa-Lynn is likable, yet distant here –even as she narrates. It took a while for me to like her, but she is strange and unusual –I could see Goth people finding her as a soul mate. Milo, her brother, is sort of manchild, who loved his wife, even though she seemed not to love him (and I’m unsure if Brynn truly loved Jessa-Lynn either. It’s great to see a bisexual character here, but Brynn comes across more as someone who can’t decide on what life she wants to live, so she splits). The two kids, Lolee and Bastien are rendered very well –though I question how close Bastien is to being a serial killer, as there is some questionable ways some animals are acquired. There’s also, from my point of view, too much detailed description of creating a taxidermy mounting. It would not be for the squeamish.

In the end, I found I had mixed feeling for this book. There are some quirky aspects, some dark, almost gallows humor here, but Mostly Dead Things takes too much glee in its descriptions of rendering the dead things, and the humor is too wildly spread; it’s a sad and strange tale about getting through the grieving process.