Time has faded some people’s memories of just how good a director Danny DeVito was before he stepped away from the camera. His specialty was pitch-black, twisted comedies with a distinctly mean streak, like “Throw Momma from the Train,” “The War of the Roses,” and “Death to Smoochy.” But he also proved his range with “Matilda,” one of the more beloved family films of the 1990s, and the ambitious biopic “Hoffa,” starring Jack Nicholson.
Then it all came crashing down with 2003’s “Duplex,” a bewilderingly toothless black comedy that lacked the bite, style, and manic energy that defined DeVito’s best work. The film was both a critical and commercial disappointment, and after its release, DeVito never directed another feature.
It was a surprisingly quiet end to a filmmaking career that had produced some of Hollywood’s darkest, funniest, and most underappreciated comedies.
Danny DeVito, now 81 years old, wants to make one more movie, eyeing a shoot in San Francisco. Specifically, he wants to adapt “McTeague,” an 1899 novel by Frank Norris that tells the story of a dentist working on Polk Street.
In an interview with SFGATE, DeVito, who calls “McTeague” a “powerful, powerful book,” confirmed that he is currently developing the project, and it could very well happen.
I’ve always been trying to make that movie […]I’m in the middle of trying to put that together
He goes on to compare the scope of the story, which inspired the 1924 Erich von Stroheim-helmed “Greed”—a film that at one point had a nine-hour director’s cut—to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.
“We’d have to make the city look like it did at the turn of the century,” DeVito said. “A lot of that would be movie magic. But I would go to San Francisco and try to shoot on Polk Street.”
It sounds too expensive for a major studio to finance a DeVito-directed passion project, especially since he hasn’t directed a feature in 23 years. But he is apparently working to assemble the funding himself, and if this project does come to fruition, it would be one of the more unusually unexpected — but much-welcomed — directorial comebacks in recent years.