Between The Dead Girl and next year’s production of The White Hotel, Brittany Murphy is clearly casting her lot these days with dark, despondent material. Ron Rothholz is producing and Simon Monjack is directing from his own adaptation of the D.M. Thomas novel, which I haven’t read in eons. I remember, however, that the heroine, a haunted opera singer who goes to Sigmund Freud to examine visions she’s been having about a white hotel, the Nazi holocaust and her (unless my memory is going) her own death.
I’ve said it before — anything that people have tried but failed to turn into a movie for a really long time (The White Hotel has been kicking around since the early ’80s) has developed a hard-luck karma that’s akin to a kind of curse. From the first idea to the first weekend in theatres a movie shouldn’t take any more than five or six years — two or three or four is better. It may sound illogical and even warped to say this, but any film that’s failed to launch for ten or twenty years is probably going to feel too precious and removed from the hurly-burly when it hits the screen.