News Story Of The Day: The 75-Year-Old Script

I was actually surprised to see that this was from The Onion. Sounds perfectly plausible to me.

Script Has Been Floating Around Hollywood For 75 Years

BURBANK, CA—According to Hollywood sources, Warner Bros. Entertainment officially acquired the rights this week to the long- unproduced film project entitled The Final Symphony, which has reportedly been floating around in various states of production with seven different studios since 1935.

The script, believed to have been originally written seven and a half decades ago as a vehicle for Clark Gable, has since undergone at least 600 drafts by 2,250 different writers, and was at various times attached to hundreds of different Hollywood stars, including Spencer Tracy, Paul Muni, Tyrone Power, Montgomery Clift, Sidney Poitier, Burt Reynolds, Dudley Moore, Cher, Liam Neeson, and Justin Long.

Film historians said the script has been making the rounds as a hot Hollywood property for so long that no one currently working in the American film industry can remember its exact genesis.

"It's impossible to say who the original screenwriter was, because the original director, along with most of the people who worked at the studio at that time, has been dead for well over 30 years," film historian Richard Schickel said of the movie, which has been known variously over the years as The Vengeance, Hearts On Fire, Final Symphony 3D, ¡Arriba, Arriba!, Finding Billy Harper, Boogly, and Untitled Eric Roberts Project. "Besides, so much has changed since then that the original script would probably be pretty hard to recognize."

"It supposedly had a crackerjack supporting role written for Basil Rathbone in it, though," Schickel added. "Which was subsequently rewritten for Mickey Rooney, and later Gene Wilder and then Chris Tucker."

Continued Schickel, "And then Rob Schneider, Wanda Sykes, and Jonah Hill."

According to dozens of sources who have read some version of the script in the past 75 years, the film concerns a soldier coming home from war and, depending on which version of the script sources saw, is either a "seriocomic love story," a "brooding psychological thriller," a "wild cinematic joyride for the post-Tarantino generation," or "a propaganda film financed by the War Department."

(Continued at The Onion)