It's a fine Spring day, and I'm coming off one of the worst colds ever. Every thing I do is underwater: I cannot walk more than thirty yards in any given direction without stopping to wheeze a little more and wish I were home. I've been lured out of my bed by my soulmate with a triple threat of Breakfast Buffet, Month-end Extra Grocery Money, and...Inherit the Wind.
Unfortunately, only one out of the three panned out. The Grocery Money was fine, but the Breakfast Buffet was almost closed by the time I came around. And Inherit the Wind....was the 1999 version.
Somehow I can see the story meeting on this one: we'd love to do "Inherit the Wind", but how? It's already been done to death, every kid in high school has had to read it, play in it, see it. We want to make it visceral, make it real again, make it viable for the 21st century. The old version looks like the Twilight Zone, and it's more about McCarthyism than it is about the Twenties, per se. How are we going to get the kids (and their parents) interested enough to watch?
The answer was, We'll assemble a dream cast (Jeff Bridges, Jack Lemmon, and George C. Scott), and shoot it with all the attention to costume and set detail that a modern television studio can muster. We'll make it more like the actual historical record, and try to show the townspeople as they actually were, not as a mindless mob. We'll make it more Christian-friendly, too, and not so blindly pro-science as the original, and give the two female parts something more to do than simply be supporting roles...
What makes this version awful instead of awesome is that Brady/Bryan is cast here as the good guy. While the original pitted a passionate career politician and power-hungry demagogue against a cool-headed and scientifically-minded lawyer, this version is about a warm-hearted man of faith defending the status quo against a cruel scientific zealot, who bullies his client and and will stop at nothing to ridicule and vilify his opponent, even though he's an old friend. That this version makes the witty and wise H. L. Menken come off not just as cynical, but as an empty nihilist, does nothing to redeem it either. When the end rolls by and Scopes is shown with his bag packed and his girl on his arm, he goes off to a life and career ruined, not the promise of a new life in the Big City.
From what I can see on the Internet, there are scads of folks who live in fundieland who would love to hear a story where reason and good sense won out, instead of some version of "the head is not as strong as the heart, the seat of true faith". McCarthyism is the kind of cause most 14 year olds love to rail against. However, most people seem to have liked this version, perhaps more than I would have liked.