missed opportunity: Jack Lemmon's "A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking"

Jack Lemmon was one of those actors who tried his hand at directing - "Kotch" in 1971, starring his buddy Walter Matthau - and seemingly stopped there. Seemingly.

In the early 1980s, Lemmon was once on board to direct a film version of John Ford Noonan's off-Broadway hit, "A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking," for producer Burt Sugarman (who would go on to produce the film of another play, Mark Medoff's "Children of a Lesser God," in 1986).

The film, adapted for the screen first by Noonan himself and then by Wendy Wasserstein, was to star Jill Clayburgh and Susan Sarandon, the latter having appeared in the piece on stage opposite Eileen Brennan.

20th Century-Fox went so far as to design pre-production ads for the film, but the project never came together.

(Artwork: Pre-production ad from a Variety pullout, circa 1981, for the shelved "A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking" film)

* * *

Anyone interested in perusing some 2060 of my film reviews, dating back to 1994, can do so by simply going to RottenTomatoes.Com