This is nearly a week old and covered with dust, but the universe isn’t big enough for two icky-sticky downer movies about poor Linda Lovelace. I wasn’t overjoyed about Matthew Wilder‘s Inferno (the former Lindsay Lohan project, now starring Malin Akerman) but I was willing to deal with it on some level. But a second competing version starring Kate Hudson as Linda and James Franco as Chuck Traynor is just impossible. There’s just not enough psychic space for both. One of them has to go. In fact, kill them both. Wait a minute…
Brainstorm: Combine both casts for a single film about Linda Lovelace (Hudson) dealing with (a) the fiendish Traynor and porn-industry exploitation and (b) at the same time coping with a Twilight Zone-ish realization that there’s another Linda Lovelace living in a parallel universe — a regular housewife and Walmart employee — who’s plotting to take over her life and career as a famous porn star. The weird thing is that the “other” Linda Lovelace (Akerman) doesn’t even look like the original. At first they fight each other in a kind of Uma Thurman in Kill Bill style, barefoot kickboxing with samurai swords, and then they team up as a two-for-one porn pair. They eventually become lesbian lovers, and then they adopt two kids — a girl and a boy. Plus they rewrite history by starting their own production company, kicking Traynor out of their lives, and eventually becoming leading voices in the feminist movement. And then in the late ’80s one of them becomes HIV-positive, gets cancer and dies.