In the new animated feature Free Birds, two turkeys travel back in time to the first Thanksgiving and try to keep their kind from becoming the traditional main course. It's a good reason as any to visit the past, kind of like the turkey equivalent of wanting to go back and assassinate Hitler before he can do his damage. What would the movie equivalent be? Not just the idea of going and destroying all Nazi propaganda before it could be used for evil, we mean specifically for the course of film history and where movies have gone.
If you're fed up with the modern Hollywood obsession with blockbusters, would you go back and keep Star Wars from being released? Might its absence make the quality of cinema we saw from the studios in the 1970s continue at least a little longer? Would you stop the careers of any stars you dislike? Adam Sandler, perhaps, or the spoofing duo of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (makers of the upcoming The Starving Games)? Halt the making of any Die Hard movies past three? Bringing it back to Star Wars, how about convincing George Lucas not to make the prequels, or at least not adding Jar-Jar to them?
Or let's be more positive. What movies would we go back to save? There's a popular documentary making the festival waves this year called Jodorowsky's Dune, and it shows what could have been had filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowski been able to make his adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi novel as originally planned. We don't know how we'd get it achieved if we showed up back in 1972, but it's fun to imagine if we had the chance.
In honor of Free Birds -- and About Time, which also involves fixing mistakes of the past -- what part of the movie business and which film releases and careers would you like to change from history if you had the means?
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