Tarsem Takes Snow White From Ratner, Tweaking Will Ensue

The following opinions are those of Joe Sommers. That’s why some of them (“masterpiece” indeed) are wrong.

You might recall Tarsem Singh as the visual stylist under whose direction J-Lo was made slightly less abrasive in the surrealist masterpiece The Cell. He was not able to completely parlay that success into his equally visually-stunning, possibly slightly over-indulgent, 2006 feature The Fall.

Essentially, for the uninitiated, the long and the short on Tarsem is that the man can lens a scene like a champ, but the density of his narratives makes Werner Herzog reach for that second cup of coffee.

Interesting then that Relativity Media has supposedly tapped him to helm a… well, if Tarsem is doing it, remake doesn’t quite work… reinterpretation, perhaps, of The Bros. Grimm’s Snow White.

Now, you’re welcome to read the Vulture piece to get the dirty on all the internal struggle that’s surrounding the making of this picture. For my dollar, the really interesting bit is that Tarsem is supposed to be working from the spec script Melisa Wallack penned for one time producer of the project… Brett Ratner. This would be the same “edgy” script Ratner announced as:

Not your grandfather’s Snow White… Melisa went back to the 500 year old folk tale and put in some of the things that were missing from Walt Disney’s film. His dwarves were miners, and here they are robbers. There is also a dragon that was in the original folk tale. Walt made one of the great movies of all time, but ours is edgy and there is more comedy. The original, made for its time, was soft compared to what we’re going to do.

I know when I think Snow White, I think about edgy comedy and dragons. Yes, Brett Ratner is truly one of America’s greatest treasures.

However, adding Tarsem to the mix almost makes the idea of Ratner’s production tolerable. If anyone can mix the discordant elements of something relatively simple and make it explode into something that requires quaaludes to comprehend (in the best possible way), it’s Tarsem.

As Deadline reported, this resurgent call to folk and fairy tales, for the most part, is all part and parcel to the success of Tim Burton’s 3D re-examination of Alice in Wonderland. However, what’s even more interesting is that Vulture reports that there may end up being no less than three competing Snow White projects:

Universal acquired screenwriter Evan Daughtry’s Snow White and the Huntsman for $1.5 million against $3 million — one of the largest script sales of the year — from Alice in Wonderland producer Joe Roth.

Disney, meanwhile, is no doubt cackling like Emperor Palpatine, screaming, ‘Excellent, excellent!’ as it readies Snow White and the Seven, which — and we’re not making this up — features the usual complement of dwarves as Shaolin fighting monks.”

So, if you are keeping score: That’s one Snow White with dragons, one further traditional Snow White… and Disney’s Shaolin monk version.

I quit. I’m going to go and get a tattoo of the Smurfs eating their own houses and listen to trip-hop until the world rights itself.