Last week, we took a moment to celebrate “Boys Don’t Cry” director Kimberly Peirce‘s return to filmmaking with this month’s “Carrie” remake, and also an unmade murder mystery project for DreamWorks entitled “Silent Star” that collapsed due to budget woes. In the same NY Times article on Peirce’s career a number of other unrealized film were examined, and with a look backwards we received an update from the director on a raunchy sex comedy set up with one of the genre’s leading figures.
Back in 2009, we picked up the news that Peirce had begun a collaboration with writer/director Judd Apatow on an Untitled Romantic Comedy that would serve in the vein of Pedro Almodovar and Woody Allen, and follow “one guy’s group of friends’ attempts to resuscitate him from the worst possible breakup and train him to find true love in this gender twist on the classic romantic comedy.” At that time Peirce was still writing a script, but after four years of radio silence on the project, it appears that a clue for its absence came in the second half of that logline.
As revealed in the NYT article, the film was called “Butch Academy,” and after a year of Apatow shepherding her through the script, Universal bought it but held onto it because they found it too edgy. “That’s not surprising given that it was very queer,” said Peirce. “It had transmen transitioning, it had butches and straight men sharing advice about how to please women. It crosses some boundaries.”
Peirce says she plans to rewrite the film soon for another go, but hopefully “Carrie” shows enough legs at the box office so that she may get a chance. The horror remake opens October 18th, and stars Chloe Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore.
