At the tail end of his interview with Bullz-Eye.com, director Harold Ramis hemmed and hawed about the film he was starting to work on with Owen Wilson, not wanting to chat it up very much because “I’m so afraid someone will get wind of what it’s about,” conceding little more than that “it’s odd. Not odd in an uncommercial way, but it’s risky. It’s a big movie. So we’ll see if the studio has the heart for it.”
Finally, however, Ramis has gone on the record – though, sadly, not with Bullz-Eye – and admitted to VH-1 that the script he and Wilson have co-written is a comedy entitled “The Year 1,” that it’s vaguely reminiscent of Mel Brooks’ “History of the World, Pt. 1” (though, one hopes, more consistently funny), and that “it’s driven by fundamentalism and my concerns about fundamentalism.”
“It’s a look at the early history of civilization,” Ramis said, “using Genesis, the first book of the Bible, as kind of an emotional psycho-social template. It’s a comedy, and when you see it, it’s gonna feel like a broad ‘Ten Commandments’ parody more than anything. A sandal epic comedy.”
Hmmm. Well, all we can say is “tread carefully.” We still remember the poor, misguided people who picketed “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.”
