The “perfect film” Mike Myers refused to remake: “I don’t think that’s a good idea”
Thanks to Hollywood’s endless obsession with thinking that everything old is irrelevant and in need of a fresh coat of paint, the list of movies that can be deemed truly safe from being remade grows shorter by the year, but at least Mike Myers was savvy enough to turn one of them down.
While nobody’s brave or stupid enough to mount a new version of something like The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, or The Shawshank Redemption, more and more classics have been dubbed fair game. They’re almost never as good, and most of them feel utterly redundant, but the studios remain convinced that the residual name value is enough of a reason to give it a green light.
Myers has never starred in a feature-length remake, but he knows a thing or two about adaptations and sequels. For one thing, Wayne’s World was an adaptation of a Saturday Night Live sketch that got a sequel, while Shrek was cribbed from a children’s picture book, Austin Powers got a trilogy, and The Cat in the Hat was a diabolical attempt at translating Dr Seuss to live-action.
Despite having a bit of a diva reputation, which has been corroborated by several former collaborators on either side of the camera, the Canadian comic’s arrogance and self-entitlement didn’t stretch so far as to convince him that he was the second coming of Benjamin Braddock, which SNL supremo Lorne Michaels so desperately wanted him to be.
In the early 1990s, during a weekend getaway at Michaels’ home in the Hamptons, where he was surrounded by “the world’s most famous people,” he was pitched a remake of The Graduate. He was in his late 20s at the time, roughly the same age that Dustin Hoffman was when he landed his breakout role in Mike Nichols’ romantic dramedy, but he knew it was a disaster waiting to happen.
“I said, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,'” he recalled. “The Graduate doesn’t need to be remade; it’s a perfect film. A little man should not stand in a great man’s shoes.” Had it been half as memorable as the original, it could have established Myers as a bona fide leading man. However, the more likely scenario was that it would fail to justify its existence, which could have killed his big-screen prospects stone dead.
Nichols may have claimed the movie’s only Academy Award for ‘Best Director’, but it secured a further six nominations, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Actor’ for Hoffman, became the highest-grossing release of 1967, and quickly became known as one of the finest and most influential films of its generation. Did it, and does it, need a remake? Absolutely not, so kudos to Myers for turning it down.
Things worked out much better in the long run, anyway, since his response to Michaels’ suggestion that he lead a new version of The Graduate was to pitch that Wayne’s World make the jump from SNL to the silver screen. “He said, ‘Write it,'” Myers said. “He’s a genius. I’m forever grateful.”
Penelope Spheeris’ comedy would launch him to cinematic stardom, something he almost certainly wouldn’t have achieved had he tried to fill Hoffman’s shoes instead.
