We’ve got another bit of news to add to the ever-growing pile of stupid ideas in Hollywood. Paramount wants to remake John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, one of the greatest films ever made about the American West.
The news was first reported by The Tracking Board and later by Variety. The new film would be produced by Matt Jackson with Gabby Canton and Elizabeth Raposo overseeing for Paramount.
Based on a Dorothy M. Johnson short story, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance stars James Stewart as a lawyer who arrives in the town of Shinbone, which is being terrorized by Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). John Wayne stars as a cowboy who helps Stewart learn to stand up for himself. The film was one of the last Westerns ever shot in black and white and is seen as a meditation on the legends of the West and how the region became civilized.
In 2007, it was added to the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
There is currently no writer attached to the project, but Paramount and Jackson already have an idea. They want the story transferred to 1980s Western Pennsylvania to make it an urban thriller in the vein of The Departed and Mystic River.