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Will Harkin Banks and the gang return in 2016?
March 7th, 2015. It’s a ballsack-hot winter day in L.A. and only
slightly cooler inside the paper-strewn office of producer Mike Marvin’s Santa
Monica townhouse, where we sit performing a table reading of the working script
of the remake to
Hotdog! The Movie alongside his ex-wife Michele. The former couple wraps up, bent over in laughter browsing
her scantily clad photos from the archives I’ve been charged with digitally
transferring that could make 1982 Playmate Shannon Tweed blush. On the couch to my
left, the marshmallow-scented puffs of their daughter Ariel’s vaporizer rolls
in clouds across the room like a bad Alice fallen in with the caterpillars of Wonderland as she listens to our little performance from an
indifferent cross-legged posture on the couch.
When the family gets together with Daddy to act
out lines from the project that could make or break the last act of his storied
career in Tinsel Town (the man has just turned 70), you know development has
begun in earnest. That’s exactly the state of affairs with Mike Marvin’s quest
to remake his 1984 cult classic,
Hotdog!
The Movie,
possibly the greatest cult classic Hollywood film ever made that
had anything to do with skiing. Michele slaps my wrist, leading the read with a sultry voiceover.
“You be Le
Morphion, kid. I’ll do camera direction, scene beats, and read for Chalker. Mikey can be Harkin.”
Credits roll in with
Hot Dog The Movie!,
as we fade in:
Melodrama and cinema quality
dictation echo through the room as Michele delivers us through the opening
beat, hard verbs, tortured spires of living granite, the flash of a Cessna,
radio garble. Into the valley floor we go, cutting now to Ext. Valley Floor,
onto Jaques Le Morphion, I’m preparing my best froggy dialect, and ...
“I am readeee for zuh-shot!
Monsieur Chalker?! Come in on zee radio, sil vous plait–if you please!”
Michele’s back with the camera, the single
engine plane buffeting now as we’re on the precipice of crashing, and...
“Closer, mon dieux! I must
have realism! Closer!” I belt.
Michele’s belting more story
beats with lines about Go Pros and a fucknut named Buzz Chalker, melding into
her own one liner as ‘Chalker’.
“We’re caught in a fuckin’
rotor, kid!! This Froggy’s gonna get us killed!”
Detailing her ex-man’s
character that is a Go-Pro'ed out Harkin Banks, we’re ready to jump into a
wintry airspace, as Marvin utters his own line, and...
“The heck’s a rotor, Chalker?!”
The reading from page one on flows on tit for tat as we hotdog our way through
the first act and into the second, pressing through to his
most recent revisions up to the 70 page mark. The table reading on this
afternoon is a warm family moment for Mike Marvin, whose quiet interior life
while gearing up for the producing war ahead is a fascinating look at a
Hollywood animal’s machinations and the many invisible processes that take a
concept from a script to the screen.
Business is run from his townhouse, where we write, hang out with the family, hustle phone calls, massage
line changes, and angle for interviews for his biopic I’m headlining the development
of. Amazing what kind of studio work happens between one’s ears and in the
simple setting of a home office these days.
“Ok sweetie, we’re out. That was hot stuff!”
comments Michele. “Oh, and I like the kid. You should let him run with what he wants. ”
We wrap up as the whiff of Ariel’s marshmallow vape curls over one final time. And
as Marvin’s girls head off into the beat of
Santa Monica, I’m left with the breathless feeling of having just shredded
through the script that just may become Hollywood’s next great sex comedy.
Hot Dog! The Movie–The Second Coming
Will Mike Marvin's campaign to remake Hot Dog! The Movie succeed in 2016? Original movie poster from the 1984 original.
The current direction of the new
Hot Dog is an evolution of the first story line following
the central journey of Harkin Banks bumping into a party-happy Sunny. In the
script, Harkin readies to make what Marvin envisions as the most spectacular
ski performance in all of cinematic history, with his
Jacques Le Morphion
character introduced as the seedy French ski filmmaker making a movie about
Harkin’s free skiing adventures.
We’re thrown into the raucous
world of modern competitive free skiing, only this time in the place of the
backdrop of freestyle moguls, aerials, and ski ballet, our intrepid hero Harkin Banks is headed out to Squaw
Valley to compete in the “Lord Of The Boards” contest, a four-pronged event combining
slopestyle, skier cross, half pipe, and big mountain skiing in order to establish
the best all-around skier in the world.
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The rest of the 'ski-ploitation' elements are all there, with plenty of ass grabbing, hot tub
antics, slug-sized joints, and antagonistic Russian competitors stepping up in
place of the Austrian ones from the original. Mike Marvin’s remake of
Hotdog! The Movie is gearing up as any
great sex comedy should, making adjustments in scope and language to start
roping in actors for an epicurean cinematic
experience sure to make the producers of
The
Hangover
blush. In short, there will even be more sauce to taste this time
around.
Mike Marvin posing with
actress Tracey Smith, who played Sunny in the original Hotdog!. Photo courtesy of Mike Marvin.
The remake to
Hot Dog has been a longtime passion project, a heritage piece in
homage to his sex comedy talent and former life as an outspoken ski film
pioneer during the boom times of freestyle skiing that raged from 1971 until its
dramatic implosion at the end of the 1977 competition season. And while others have
asked why Marvin would want to do a remake of the ultimate ski spoof–to which
my go-to response harps on the deep heritage of the original film–Marvin’s answer is
more simple.
“To make money, dude. It has to be commercial to pull something
like this off... but there’s also a lot of heritage.”
Heritage indeed. But that’s another story, one that starts at the very dawn of ski
porn. Drop in on my Hotdog! The Legacy column for a taste of that pie.
Rick Sylvester drops like a stone towards the
valley floor of Yosemite Valley during the world’s first ever ski
cliff BASE jump, January 31st, 1972, filmed for Mike Marvin’s
seminal 1972 ski film Earth Rider. This photo would go on to make the front
page of the LA Times before snowballing across newspapers the world over. Photo
courtesy of the Henry Diltz Gallery.
The story in development for the
Hot Dog remake is somewhat liken to the cult classic tribute form George Miller has recently enhanced by putting together Mad Max: Fury Road, where we will be seeing Max united with the Furiosa
heroine. “Idaho wonder boy ski film star Harkin Banks meets party girl Sunny on
his quest to become world champion freeskier, vibing with agro Russian snot bag
rival Ivan Yakinoff in a balls-deep competition to be the king of the hill”
sums up the log line for preparations for this remake.
Consider also how director
John Milius’s 1978 surf classic
Big
Wednesday
ignited the “surfploitation” genre, going all the way to complete flops like Blue Crush and the bare bottom of Matthew McConaughey's career, Surfer, Dude. In the same fashion, Hot Dog had a large influence on the
wide succession of “skiploitation” films to trickle in across Hollywood’s radar
in the ensuing decades, an ever more curious consideration taking into account
Mike Marvin’s original continues to be the only widely commercially successful
Hollywood ski film in history, having grossed some $38 million worldwide.
If any project has the raw kinetic ability to kickstart the scope of skiing
back into Tinsel Town’s mainstream, it stands to reason the
Hot Dog remake harbors that power.
Marvin’s crucible will be to attach the right
people to the project, from the director to the cast to the writers that make the
final adjustments updating the concept, and to then hotdog his way through the
filming with out-of-this-world cinematography, such as with the new iteration of
the infamous Chinese downhill. While he may direct himself, no final decision
has been made.
Finance has also been
achieved, with a cool $12,000,000 in the pipeline. But pressing the go button to
spend it is not as simple as ski fans might like it to be, a side
to this emerging story I will be addressing in following journal entries.
“What the fuck do we do if there’s no snow?” asks Marvin as we continue through
the afternoon hashing out the development plan in his home studio HQ. My answer
to him remains steadfast that all prayers are best answered by putting your
sermon on the page.
'What the fuck do we do if there’s no snow?' asks
Marvin As we continue through the afternoon hashing out the development plan in
his home studio HQ. My answer to him remains steadfast that all prayers are
best answered by putting your sermon on the page.
As such, an entirely new story direction may evolve over the coming year of
development, especially considering the fretful factor of the western United
States continued lack of snowfall. The consistent diminished accumulation
could threaten continuity with shoot locations, potentially leaving it up to
the team to write some fantastic twist into the plot connected to the climate change reaping havoc on the ski industry.
“Squallywood” (Squaw Valley)
may be the heart of the script setting for now, but other directions like
writing in a Lord Of The Boards tour moving
through Jackson Hole, Alaska, Chamonix, or Japan that kicks off out of the
destination extreme skiing scene that was host to the original Hot Dog could
just as well make the final cut in some fashion depending on the development
teams continued talks with their executives, and how it all shakes out on the
page with adjusting to mother nature.
But remember, it’s a sex
comedy, not a ski porn. While there’s sure to be some of the most mind boggling
ski cinematography we’ve seen come out of Hollywood in years, the story is most
closely centered around not just what happens below Harkins’ legs, but also
what happens between them–and everything else off the slopes.
