The Sam Mendes-directed and Steven Spielberg-produced The Voyeur’s Motel has been scrapped. The big-screen adaptation of Gay Talese’s book will no longer be, according to a report over at Deadline.
Dreamworks Pictures were set to back the project after reportedly bagging the rights for close to $1 million. The reason for the film no longer going ahead seems to be the existence of a documentary of the same subject matte – about a guy who built a motel purely to watch people have sex.
Why did the project die? Basically because there were two unexpected voyeurs neither Mendes nor DreamWorks knew about going in: filmmakers Myles Kane and Josh Koury, who trailed both Talese and hotel owner Gerald Foos for a documentary feature. Mendes, who only learned about the documentary when he read about it on Deadline, finally watched a cut of the film with his scribe Wilson-Cairns.
“She and I sat and watched the documentary and looked at each other at the end and said, ‘we can’t make our film,” Mendes told the trade blog.
“Nobody told us about [the documentary],” Mendes added. “Nobody told DreamWorks, nobody told me. It was going on all that time; they had been making the documentary for at least a year before the publication of the book, which is one of the reasons it’s such a strong piece of work. But nobody ever told us, simple as that, which clearly is frustrating. It’s difficult to talk about it without giving away what is so wonderful about the documentary, but it has so many things that are wonderful and can only be achieved by a documentary.”
It sounds very disappointing for Mendes and all involved in the planned movie, but the documentary sounds very intriguing and one to look out for. Hit the link above for more over at Deadline.
