The Day Of The Jackal - The Hollywood Remake That Wasn't
With Eddie Redmayne set to play the Jackal on Sky this November, a quick piece on the scandal surrounding 1997's The Jackal starring Sidney Poitier, Richard Gere and Bruce Willis...
A TV remake of The Day Of The Jackal!? Well, no, I’m not that happy about it. Still,
I suppose it’s only fair to give the show and Mr Edward Redmayne a chance to see how well they can fill the boots of Fred Zinnemann and Edward Fox.
Speaking of the Oscar-winning Mr Zinnemann, we’ve him to thank for ensuring that a previous assassination story wasn’t unleashed upon the public using author Frederick Forsyth’s marvellous mood title.
The film in question was 1997’s The Jackal, a Michael Caton-Jones movie in which Bruce Willis plays the title character, a hit-man hired to shoot Sidney Poitier’s CIA chief . Richard Gere, meanwhile, is the IRA man freed from jail to bring Bruce to book, a feat that’s hampered by his having the worst Oirish accent this side of Tommy Lee Jones in Blown Away.
Anything but a remake of Zinnemann’s awesome original, the idea to nick the title belonged to Hal Lieberman, The Jackal’s executive producer. As he explained at the time, “I don’t know about anyone else but I made the assumption it would be okay to use the original title. Maybe I’m a shmuck to have made that assumption. But it was ignorant behaviour, not malicious. It was to be done in honour of two tremendous men and their work.”
The men in question were tremendously unamused. In a strongly-worded letter to the studio, Forsyth asked whether Universal would ever “contemplate a film about a Washington-based weather forecaster and call it A Man For All Seasons?”
Zinnemann, on the other hand, was “very, very angry” that Universal “took it for granted that they could just go ahead and hijack the title.”
In the end, the man who made High Noon and From Here To Eternity shamed the studio into doing the right thing. “The one thing these big companies don’t like is something that affects their image,” Zinnemann told Neon’s Garth Grundy. “They want to be seen to be playing straight, so using the word ‘hijack’ upset them.”
In his eighties at the time of the debacle, Fred Zinnemann will forever have my respect for averting this disaster. We must now all hoped that Eddie Redmayne and friends don’t soil The Day Of The Jackal’s - bloody - good name…
Mmmm ... A Man For All Seasons, eh?