It’s occurred to me that Hollywood might have missed on a lucrative crossover opportunity with two of this year’s big summer movies.
Exhibit A is Public Enemies, Michael Mann’s superb flick about Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger. According to a decades-old urban myth, Dillinger was the proud owner of an enormous schwanzstucker which ended up as an exhibit in Washington DC’s prestigious Smithsonian Institution. I discussed this tawdry matter at great length (appropriately enough) elsewhere.
Exhibit B is the family-friendly comedy-caper Night at the Museum 2 (written by Robert Ben Garant and my namesake, Thomas Lennon), where Ben Stiller once again plays the hapless security guard working the night shift at a museum where all the exhibits come to life. The original Night at the Museum was set in New York’s Natural History Museum, where Stiller’s character, Larry, found himself embroiled in a veritable plethora of comedic hi-jinks with reanimated versions of Theodore Roosevelt, Attila The Hun and the skeletal remains of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. For this summer’s sequel, however, the action was relocated to Washington DC’s prestigious Smithsonian Institution.
Can you see where I’m going with this?
Of course, Michael Mann saw fit to exclude any reference to the famous urban myth in Public Enemies, while Night at the Museum 2‘s imdb profile makes no mention of so much as a fleeting cameo appearance by John Dillinger’s severed shlong. And that’s a shame, really. A harrowing, post-credit stinger at the end of Public Enemies could have featured Billy Crudup’s sinister J. Edgar Hoover approaching Dillinger’s corpse in Cooke County Morgue, brandishing a scalpel and wearing nothing but a fluffy black dress. We could have then cut (if you pardon the expression) to Night at the Museum 2, where – seventy-five years’ later – Dillinger’s CG animated, belligerent pickled pecker is now giving Ben Stiller’s hapless night watchman a hard time.
If, of course, you pardon that expression, too.
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