Merrick here...
THE WRAP says that Scripter/Producer/Novelist Richard Shapiro, along with wife/creative cohort Esther, are looking to resurrect DYNASTY - a series they wrote and/or Executive Produced throughout a better part of the 80s for ABC television.
The show followed the turmoils and melodramas of The Carringtons, an incomprehensibly wealthy oil family based in Denver (if memory serves). They often came into conflict with The Colbys, a rival family who received their own spin-off in 1985.
The Shapiros have also revealed the movie would serve as something of an origin story...
"...We want to go back to the beginning with these characters and use the film to trace their roots. We’re taking Blake Carrington back to his young manhood and when he met Alexis, and setting the movie in the 'Mad Men' era of the 1960s. It will give us the opportunity to start fresh, without the constraints that television placed on our characters in the series.”
The original series featured a majestic theme by Bill Conti (THE RIGHT STUFF, many of the ROCKY films) - and a title sequence which had cool little etchy-transitional-effect-things that I used to love back in the day, and still aren't too bad, really.
This is all very strange to me. While I'd completely forgotten until preparing this article, I now vividly recall making hand party to many of the women (Heather Locklear, Catherine Oxenberg, Emma Samms, etc.) populating both DYNASTY and its spin-off. If the new film actually moves forward (whatever happened to that DALLAS movie we were hearing so much about?), hopefully they'll do an equally admirable job procuring an...agreeable...female cast.
You can find the progenitor DYNASTY saga HERE, or it's also rentable through Netflix.
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