This past April, Sam Mendes, Steven Spielberg (with his producer's hat on) and DreamWorks announced their intention to adapt The Voyeur's Motel, Gay Talese's New Yorker article and follow-up book on the controversial and fascinating subject of a hotelier who claimed to spy on his guests. But after some factual issues have arisen about the case, Mendes and the rest have decided to scrap the movie.
The film was to have brought to the screen the activity of Colorado resident Gerald Foos, a lifelong voyeur who went so far as to open a hotel so he could covertly spy on his occupants. Telling himself and anyone who wanted him to explain his actions that he was an observer of human behaviour, he'd watch guests having sex and sometimes would do more than observe. He ended up complicit in a murder after flushing a dealer's drugs down the toilet, leading the man to suspect his girlfriend and strangle her. Foos eventually went to Talese, who had written a groundbreaking book on sexual mores, to tell his story. Writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns had delivered a draft of the script that had everyone excited to work quickly on this one, but then came a documentary from Myles Kand and Josh Koury, who had been trailing Foos and Talese for a year, and learned that not all of the facts in Foos' story added up.
"Nobody told us about the documentary," Mendes, who has since watched a cut of the film, tells Deadline. "Nobody told DreamWorks, nobody told me. It was going on all that time; they had been making the documentary for at least a year before the publication of the book, which is one of the reasons it’s such a strong piece of work. But nobody ever told us, simple as that, which clearly is frustrating. It’s difficult to talk about it without giving away what is so wonderful about the documentary, but it has so many things that are wonderful and can only be achieved by a documentary. The interviews ask the question; who is the voyeur? Is it Gerald Foos, who bought the motel with the leering rooms, or is it Gay Talese, who, in a way, is equally walking a moral knife edge by writing about it? Who is the person peddling the fantasy? Is it someone who’s doing it and telling only one person, or is it someone who makes that into a published work that is read by and discussed by many thousands?"
Concerned about a repetition of the James Frey/A Million Little Pieces embellishment scandal that left Warner Bros. ditching the rights to his memoir, Mendes and his team are moving on to other things – though don't expect him to run back into the arms of James Bond. For more on what happened, head to Deadline.