angelophile | GI JOE Director FIRED?

"Something smells fishy."

Now, I'm not usually in the habit of repeating Hollywood gossip, but occasionally I hear something that... interests me. And this one comes from a source that's proved to be pretty much entirely accurate in the past. No, not AICN. God forbid. Anyway, the story goes like this:

EndTimes Tells You What He Has Heard: GI JOE Director FIRED!

"So the story goes like this-

After a test screening wherein the film tested the lowest score ever from an audience in the history of Paramount, the executive who pushed for the movie Brad Weston had Stephen Sommers, the super hack director of the film fired. Removed. Locked out of the editing room.

Stuart Baird, a renowned "fixer" editor was brought it to try to see if it could be made releasable. Meanwhile producer Lorenzo whose turkey IMAGINE THAT explodes this weekend as the new bomb in theatres (also championed by Weston) was told his services were no longer needed on the film either.

Sommers was then forced by his William Morris agents to pretend that he was working on Tarzan over at Warner Brothers doing design work, even though that film doesn't even have a good script yet. When word of the firing started to be whispered about in Hollywood, Sommers was summoned back to the editing room- but only to save appearances, Baird is still editing the movie with studio input.

Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner, who turned down other offers from the property to go with the script that was rushed in 8 weeks by Stuart Beattie because of the writer's strike is frantic that this will destroy the brand and is distancing himself from the pending catastophe.

NONE of this needed to happen, except someone who did not know the mythology, Lorenzo was in charge of the film and never contradicted Sommers on anything. Lorenzo, so you know, was Chairman of Warners and had GI JOE under option there (not as a producer) for SEVEN years and he refused to greenlight the film, stating that because he gre up in Italy he had no knowledge of it. If you google enough, at one point you will see he wanted the film to be about an action hero named MANN (Action Man, get it) and he clearly had no clue what the GI Joe world really was.

And the hapless hack Sommers? Where did he come from? The confused Jon Fogelman at William Morris, who signed Hasbro away from CAA, had to find a director in a hurry for his new clients and gave him the only guy who he repped who would do it. A sad end to what COULD have been a great franchise. Acceleration suits indeed."

Now if all that's true... huh. Doesn't suggest that the GI Joe movie's going to be much cop. A shame for Ray Park, Chris Eccleston and Dennis Quaid, all of whom I have a lot of time for. I don't think people were expecting a masterpiece, but this sounds like a car crash. If this were the usual Hollywood gossip I'd disregard it, but this EndTimes chap who pops up mysteriously on the boards I post on does have a pretty good track record of speaking the truth and definitely has industry links of some kind.

Curiouser and curiouser.