Horrors! Attack of the remakes

Austria moves in Hollywood sync

To paraphrase one of Austria's most famous sons: They'll be back.

When Robert von Dassanowsky's mother, Elfi, passed away in October, the two of them were in the midst of trying to resuscitate Belvedere Film, a company with a legacy 60 years old. In 1946, at the age of 22, Elfi co-founded the studio during the postwar Allied occupation of Vienna and used it to revive film entertainment (musicals, comedies, Heimatfilm) untainted by propaganda.

The studio only made seven movies before Elfi moved to Los Angeles in 1962, where she worked as a vocal coach on Otto Preminger's films (she had been an opera singer and casting director in Europe).

By virtue of her achievements, Elfi is considered a feminist icon in Europe and will be honored with a special internment at Vienna's Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery) this summer, where she'll share space with Beethoven and Arthur Schnitzler.

Elfi's son Robert is an author ("Austrian Cinema: A History") and film scholar currently teaching at UCLA, and he reformed Belvedere with his mother in 1999 just as modern Austrian writer-directors such as Ulrich Seidl ("Dog Days"), Barbara Albert ("Northern Skirts") and Michael Haneke ("Cache," "Funny Games") were brewing up a resurgence. (In the '30s, '40s and '50s, Austria provided Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann and Erich von Stroheim, among others.)

And on the heels of Stefan Ruzowitsky's "The Counterfeiters" winning Austria's first foreign film Oscar this year, Von Dassanowsky thinks it's the perfect time to renew Hollywood-Central European co-productions that take advantage of Central European talent, locations and aesthetics. So next month he plans to pitch three feature projects to the studios: a spy comedy, a biopic of Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis (who discovered the benefits of hand-washing) and a resistance novel that he is translating and adapting himself.

"It's the Austrian turn now," says Von Dassanowsky. "What the French had in the '60s, the Italians had in the '50s and the Germans had in the '70s -- the Austrians are finally getting it. It's not a very feel-good cinema, but it's a thoughtful cinema."

Another 'Circuit' for a comedy

Last Friday, news broke that Dimension Films has acquired the rights to remake "Short Circuit," a lighthearted comedy from 1986 about a military robot named Johnny 5 that gets hit by lightning and gains a conscience. S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock ("Wild Wild West"), the writers of the original film and its 1988 sequel, will also pen the reboot.