(“The f’ckin’ leads are weak???”)

That’s one of my favorite headlines I’ve ever had to write.  It’s true. Just to reiterate: Disney was paying David Mamet to write a movie about a girl who dies in the Holocaust and they rejected it because it was TOO DARK.

The writer who took on ethnic politics in the play “Race,” and sexual politics in works like “Oleanna,”  [not to mention the politics of Tim Allen learning Jiu-Jitsu in Redbelt. -Ed.] takes on modern anti-Semitism in “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

But the screenplay is not a retelling of the famous Holocaust drama taken from the diaries of Frank, but about a contemporary Jewish girl who goes to Israel and learns about the traumas of suicide bombing.  “It’s very intense, and dark and scary,” said the executive. “It’s not a film version of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank.’ The story evolved into something more intense.” [TheWrap]

That’s a shame, Disney, it really is.  You wanted a guy to write a movie about Nazis murdering a little girl, and here the guy gives you something intense and scary.  What’s wrong with people these days.  Anyway, I think the obvious solution is to make the Nazis a pack of wolves and the Franks a family of squirrels.  It’ll still be scary, but now the characters will be covered in soft fur.

(“Uh, I’m here for the gangbang?”)

Despite the fact that this sounds like a pitch for an SNL sketch (in the vein of Patton Oswalt’s “Midnight in the Olive Garden of Good and Evil”) David Mamet really is writing a screen version of The Diary of Anne Frank.

The film will be an amalgamation of the famed diary; the stage adaptation by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich; and Mamet’s own original take on the material that could reframe the story as a young girl’s rite of passage. Frank, who died at 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, became an icon of the Holocaust after the post-war publication of the diary that she kept during the two years that her family hid in a secret attic apartment in Amsterdam. [Variety]

Yes! That’s what The Diary of Anne Frank was always missing: witty, fast-paced dialog!

Say Anne, whaddya think about keepin a diary?

Keepin’ a diary?

That’s right, a diary.  A book where ya put ya thoughts, ya dreams… ya philosophizin’.

I know what a diary is, ya wiseguy.  Why should I keep a diary?  Why I ain’t nothin but a little Jewish girl, hidin’ out, tryin’ ta keep away from da Nazis.  Ooh I hate dem big, ugly goodfanuttin Nazis!

Sure, but like I said, it’s a place where you put your hopes, ya dreams.

I just tole ya, my dream’s ta keep away from da Nazis, what I need a book for?

…Okay, I admit, my David Mamet parody might’ve gotten infected with The Three Stooges.  It happens. Still, I’m excited for this.  Almost as excited as I am for Joss Whedon’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Aaron Sorkin’s Les Miserables, Sam Mendes’ Transformers 3.  Or the George Romero remake of State & Main, State & Main & Zombies.  (it’s a metaphor).