Touchstone Plus-Or-Minus: D.O.A.

In April 1950, producer Leo C. Popkin released the low-budget film noir D.O.A. starring Edmond O’Brien (one of the future stars of Disney’s Moon Pilot) and directed by Rudolph Maté. To put this into Disney context, this was around the time Walt released his sixteenth feature film, Cinderella. D.O.A. was not an immediate success. Suspense programmers like it were a dime a dozen back then and critics and audiences responded appropriately. But over the years, D.O.A.’s reputation grew, especially after it fell into the public domain and became a frequent attraction on the late late show. By the mid-80s, it was beginning to be recognized as one of the most unique and innovative noirs of its time. Needless to say, that combined with its public domain status made it ripe for remaking.

I’m not entirely sure where the idea to remake D.O.A. originated. The new version was produced by Ian Sander, a former actor moving into production, and Laura Ziskin. Together, they had produced the 1983 TV-movie One Cooks, The Other Doesn’t starring former Disney star Suzanne Pleshette and Joseph Bologna. Ziskin had gone on to produce the Sally Field comedy Murphy’s Romance and the Kevin Costner thriller No Way Out. D.O.A. was her first Touchstone picture but she’d be very active at the studio over the next several years. Projects like this often start with the rights-holder and/or the producers, so perhaps one of them had been a fan of the original.

Or, it could have started with screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue. Pogue had more than proved he knew how to write a remake nobody really expects or demands with his script for David Cronenberg’s 1986 masterpiece The Fly. The film also gives Pogue a story credit alongside original screenwriters Russell Rouse, who’d died in 1987, and Clarence Greene, as opposed to the traditional “based on a screenplay by” credits utilized by remakes. That could be a WGA ruling or simply a nod to the fact that Pogue kept the basic premise of the 1950 film while changing everything else about it.