Paramount's scrounging for potential remakes turns up Soapdish

By Sean O'Neal | February 23, 2011 | 9:16pm

Aux Features Film

Those who loved 1991’s Soapdish can officially stop recreating all your favorite scenes on YouTube and building your elaborate Soapdish dioramas: Paramount is now developing a remake of the film. Ben Schwartz, the writer-actor perhaps best known to our readers as the unctuous Jean-Ralphio on Parks And Recreation, will handle the script—a leap to feature films after years of contributing gags to Robot Chicken and Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update. Aaron Spelling and Alan Greisman produced the original, which chronicled a typically melodramatic daytime soap opera and the equally outlandish goings-on behind the scenes, and it’s Greisman who will take over production duties of the remake alongside Rob Reiner. (Spelling has recused himself on account of being dead.)

Obviously, the casting on this will be crucial: Soapdish’s ensemble of Sally Field, Kevin Kline, Whoopi Goldberg, Cathy Moriarty, Teri Hatcher, Elisabeth Shue, Carrie Fisher, and Robert Downey Jr. turned what could have been a flat satire of soap-opera tropes into something that, while not always as cutting as it pretended to be, was often genuinely funny. Recreating that kind of chemistry certainly won’t be easy, as any of Gary Marshall's recent films will attest. Soapdish was also released when the daytime soap opera wasn’t all but a vanishing species, one reduced to self-parody after years of telenovelas and Passions. In short, it feels very much like a movie of its time—but fortunately for Paramount, that time was 20 whole years ago, before recorded history.