Released last year, the modest mockumentary A Complete History of My Sexual Failuresblurred fact and fiction in what purported to be an unsparing portrait of its director, Chris Waitt. Now it's about to be remade as a Hollywood narrative feature by Jay Roach.
Before that, Roach will remake the hit 1998 French comedy Le Dîner des Cons, in which smug friends make fun of a hapless dinner guest. Steve Carell and Paul Rudd star in Roach's version, Dinner with Schmucks.
Jake Gyllenhaal, who stars in Jim Sheridan's imminent US remake of the Danish drama Brothers, will join Jim Carrey in a new treatment of the 1958 musical Damn Yankees, in which an avid baseball fan makes a Faustian pact with the devil. And Neil LaBute will direct the US remake of Death at a Funeral, the 2007 British comedy of a dysfunctional family whose deceased patriarch is revealed as secretly gay. The new version will star Chris Rock, Danny Glover, Martin Lawrence and James Marsden.
Meanwhile, recycling continues with the hit 1990 pottery-and-passion movie Ghostabout to become a stage musical, with music and lyrics by ex-Eurythmic Dave Stewart and Glen Ballard. It opens next year in the West End, which is already awash with musicals based on movies, among them Billy Elliot, Hairspray, Grease, Dirty Dancing, Sunset Boulevard, La Cage aux Follesand Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
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