April 18, 2020

SAMLA 2020 Proposal Bill Mooney

When is a Remake not a “Remake”?

The Rainmaker (1997) made by Francis Ford Coppola, from a John Grisham novel, is a film that superficially bears little resemblance to The Verdict (1982). In the one a kid just out of law school files suit against a health insurance company, in the other a recovering alcoholic takes on the Archdiocese of Boston in a hospital malpractice case. In the one, Frank Galvin (Paul Newman), a recovering alcoholic has for support a former law professor at a local college, played by Jack Warden; in the other, Rudy Baylor (Matt Damon) has as his back up a street-smart lawyer who has failed the bar exam five times, played by Danny DeVito. Damon and DeVito face a high-powered law firm, led by Leo F. Drummand (Jon Voigt) very like one in The Verdict led by Ed Concannon (James Mason); in both films the big firms illegally infiltrate their opponents and in both the legal teams spar in the chambers of a judge with his thumb on the scales of justice, played by Dean Stockwell and Milo O’Shea respectively. These films have different sources, different titles, and The Rainmaker in no sense was presented or marketed as a remake of The Verdict. Yet, as one watches Coppola’s 1997 movie, the sense of familiarity and of its reference to The Verdict grows. Ultimately one can think of The Rainmaker as an homage by one of the great twentieth century directors to the famous David Mamet screenplay directed by Sidney Lumet fifteen years before, built on a similar dramatic armature to develop similar tropes in satisfying the requirements of its genre. Is this an adaptation if only superficial elements are changed? Can it be called an homage if it is sufficiently veiled to avoid recognition? Can it be seen as an appropriation if no attempt is made to exploit the original beyond almost secretly savoring an appreciation for its art? This paper will explore what is to be gained, if anything, from reading these films in tandem.

A/V needs: Projector

Bio: Bill Mooney is chairperson of the Film, Media, and Performing Arts department at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Publications include Dashiell Hammett and the Movies, Rutgers University Press, 2014, and, most recently, the article “From All about Eve (1950) to Clouds of Sils Maria (2014): Adapting a Classic Paradigm,” LFQ, Summer 2017. He is currently working on a book for the Palgrave Macmillan series, Studies on Adaptation in Visual Culture, edited by Julie Grossman and Barton Palmer.