I Am No Joke Very Excited For David Gordon Green To Do LITTLE HOUSE

The director may bring Laura Ingalls Wilder's books to the big screen.

By Oct. 01, 2012

I love Little House on the Prairie. With zero shame or irony. I like the books, which are like the earliest precursors to Young Adult novels. But I really love the TV show, which was strange and earnest and scary and funny and sweet and just about everything else a TV show could be in an hour. I don't know that there's ever been a non-anthology that was as all over the map as Little House, which could swing from tough life lessons to light hearted family episodes to HORRIFYING MIME RAPE. 

The show was a real saga, following the Ingalls family from the earliest days of their settlement in the west to their final decision to BLOW UP THEIR WHOLE TOWN in the finale (seriously, what a show). Along the way the characters aged, grew, married, went blind, died from opium addictions, and were of course, RAPED BY HORRIFYING MIMES. Also there was an episode about bed wetting, because star and producer Michael Landon was a bedwetter as a boy. 

Sony is looking to return the property to the screen, but this time the big one, and they've approached David Gordon Green to do it. He feels perfect to me; his earlier stuff like Undertow and George Washington has a naturalistic feel for the people on the outskirts of the world, people who back in the 1800s might have been pioneers. Now, I don't know that Sony would want DGG to bring that style to this movie, but I can't help but think his experience working with young actors in loose environments will make his time with the new Half Pint and Mary be excellent. 

Beyond that, I believe there's just something so compelling about this story of a family braving the harshest conditions and staying together. There's a completely non-ironic, undistanced, emotionally honest thing happening here that I welcome in our movies. At least I hope that's the direction of the movie, and that this isn't some sort of Land of the Lost style goof. That would bum me out. Abi Morgan, who wrote Shame, is writing the script. It would also bum me out if we saw Pa's cock.

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