How ‘The Playboy Club’ and ‘Pan Am’ Cost Us Lee Daniels’ Take on ‘Valley of the Dolls’
One of the few moments of calm in Lee Daniels‘ new Netflix thriller “The Deliverance” comes when the tormented Jackson family sits down together to watch a favorite movie. The movie Daniels chose to bring three generations together in a communal viewing experience? The 1967 adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s camp classic “Valley of the Dolls.”
For Daniels, it was a tip of the hat to a movie he loves even though he doesn’t exactly think it’s good. “It’s one of my favorite films, and I still don’t know why,” he told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “It really is camp, but in a bad way camp. Not in a good way. But I love it, I live for it.”
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The “Valley of the Dolls” reference in “The Deliverance” isn’t just a tribute to a favorite movie; it’s also a callback to one of Daniels’ unrealized projects. Back in the early 2010s, the director intended to remake “Valley of the Dolls” as a television series, and he had his own unique spin on the tale of three young women clawing their way through the entertainment business.
“I had a fourth doll that was biracial and passing for white so she could fit in,” Daniels said. “She ended up running William Morris in the 1960s, and then she became like Angela Davis with her ‘fro and everything. She became black and it was so good.”
Unfortunately, Daniels’ project was thwarted due to a couple of high profile failures set in the same time period. “I had it set up at CBS,” Daniels said, “but they didn’t do it because ‘The Playboy Club’ and ‘Pan Am’ both did badly and they got scared.” One can’t help but wonder what the creator of “Empire” would have done with the fertile ground of 1960s Hollywood, and Daniels confirms that there was a lot of potential in the series that never was. “The script was a beast,” he said.
For fans of both Daniels and the original film, it’s hard to give up hope that someday his take on the material could still find its way onto television screens.
The Lee Daniels episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast will premiere on Saturday, August 31.
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