It’s good to have John Landis back. After a 12 year break from cinema screen, the director is returning this year with the Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis starring Burke & Hare, and now Deadline reports that he’s lining up a biopic about EC Comics co-founder, Bill Gaines.
Landis spoke about the planned movie while promoting Burke & Hare in Cannes, where he’s also trying to line up financing for his Gaines biopic. The film will look at the period in the 1950s when an increasingly prurient society decided it wanted to stamp down on what it saw as the increasing amounts of sex and violence in comic books. It’ll be based on a script by Joel Eisenberg called Ghoulishly Yours, William M Gaines.
Despite initial resistance, the comics industry eventually had to agree to a rating systems and to generally tone everything down (which many have blamed for how camp the likes of Batman and Superman got in the late 50s and early 60s, leading to the Adam West TV series). However Gaines retaliated by taking one of his magazines, MAD, and making it far more satirical, taking a swipe at all the holy cows on 1950s society, and trying to reveal the hypocrisy of it. Unfortunately for Gaines, the puritans won and after he gave completely unapologetic testimony to a US Senate subcommittee investigating juvenile delinquency, he was drummed out of the industry.
It’ll be quite an unusual project for Landis, but definitely an interesting one.