God Isn’t Dead--He’s Just in Development at Fox

A number of high-profile personalities--including writer-director Nora Ephron, “Wayne’s World” wizard Mike Myers, director-producer Frank Oz, comedian Garry Shandling and actors Bill Murray and Rick Moranis--are interested in putting their creative stamps on a planned movie send-up of “The Ten Commandments” at 20th Century Fox.

While the project is in its formative stages and deals still need to be worked out with all the interested behind-and-before-the-camera players, the idea is that 10 different creative types will contemporize one of the Ten Commandments (either by their own hand or by hiring a writer), which will all be thematically linked.

Fox-based independent producer Lynda Obst is overseeing the project, which was conceived and brought to her by her “Sleepless in Seattle” associate producer Jim Skotchdopole and his partner Kilian Kerwin.

Obst, who will serve as executive producer and who credited Skotchdopole with attracting much of the talent to the movie idea before she got involved, said she’s going to do everything she can to help the producing partners “complete it in the same first-rate way they brought it in.”

Skotchdopole said he expects each of the shorts to run 8-10 minutes.

“The comedic possibilities are endless and parody and satire is the best way to deliver lessons like this,” says Skotchdopole, noting that the “creative force” behind each segment will use his or her ingenuity to interpret how the “10 foundations of ethical behavior fit in today.”

Offering up his own creative spin, Skotchdopole suggests: “When Moses came down with tablets and said ‘thou shalt remember the Sabbath,’ there was no Super Bowl Sunday. . . . In the end, human nature will be revealed and hopefully redeemed--you’ll have seen the best of men and the worst of men.”

Obst said she likes to think of the work as “The Ten Commandments: The Revisions.”

“The millennium is like Christmas for the species and it’s time to take a look at whether we’ve been good or bad, naughty or nice.” With word of the project beginning to leak out, the producers and Fox sources said there’s already been a flood of interest from a number of actors and directors.

“Everybody in the comedy world is a potential jockey for these commandments,” Kerwin noted.

“There’s been a really quick response to this,” remarked a senior Fox executive.

Though Fox officials took their standard “we don’t comment on development projects” position, studio sources say top executives there are high on the movie idea.

All involved realize the logistic headaches of getting an anthology movie with 10 different creative forces off the ground, though obviously “Ten Commandments” won’t be the first attempt at such a feat. In most cases, the end products have not exactly turned out to be big commercial successes.

Miramax’s 1988 release “Aria” featured 10 creative renditions of famous opera arias crafted by such directors as Robert Altman, Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell, Jean-Luc Godard, Bruce Beresford, Derek Jarman, Franc Roddam, Charles Sturridge and Julian Temple. A year later, Disney’s “New York Stories” featured three short films about the Big Apple directed by Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola.

Back in 1952, Fox itself made “O. Henry’s Full House,” a compendium of five of the author’s short stories directed by Henry Hathaway, Henry Hawks, Henry King, Henry Koster and Jean Negulesco, which starred a number of the studio’s contract players, including Marilyn Monroe, Richard Widmark, Anne Baxter, Jean Peters and Jeanne Crain.

Earlier big-screen anthologies included Paramount’s 1932 release “If I Had a Million,” featuring episodes by such directors as James Cruze, H. Bruce Humberstone, Stephen Roberts, William A. Seiter and Ernst Lubitsch and MGM’s 1951 “It’s a Big Country” directed by Charles Vidor, Richard Thorpe, John Sturges, Don Hartman, Don Weis, Clarence Brown and William Wellman.