Is Brad Pitt Getting Long in the Tooth?
It looks like Brad "Pretty Boy" Pitt is returning to the world of the undead. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Summit Pictures is developing an "action-oriented" Dracula project. Titled Vlad, it's based on a script by actor Charlie Hunnam. Music video director Anthony Mandler may helm the film. Pitt would produce through his Plan B Entertainment production company.
According to HR, "Vlad centers on Dracula as a young prince; he is known to history as Vlad the Impaler, the man behind the Dracula myth... With Vlad, Summit hopes to make a visually edgy and radical period movie that also will break a new talent."
I must confess I'm not exactly psyched for this project. Pitt seems like a good guy, and a true humanitarian. But I'm really getting tired of people perpetuating the falsehood that Vlad the Impaler is "the man behind the Dracula myth".
Bram Stoker just happened to come across the name Dracula -- associated with the prince -- while working on his classic novel. And he liked it so much he used it as the name of his title character. That's it! Period. End of story. While it's all very romantic to ascribe some mythology or backstory to the character, those who do so are really missing the point of what makes Stoker's novel great -- it's a lurid potboiler examining male anxiety in Victorian England; and it's a horror novel that happens to depict, uniquely and perhaps unintentionally, a fear that polite society, in those days, dare not speak of -- that as England became more mannered, more civilized, more sophisticated, Eastern European "savages" would take away its women.
Dracula is not, has never been, and never will be, a romance novel or a tale of action. Two things that Hollywood seems determined to covince people it is.
