Hollywood can't seem to come up with original ideas. And it never loses its appetite for obvious high-concept ideas.
So in the interest of - well, really, in my own interest, here's what seems like an obvious idea I haven't seen before. The following has been copyrighted and registered with the Writers Guild. But feel free to contact me to buy it:
It's a ribald romantic comedy called Grandma Is a Cougar. And it teams those two late-blooming icons of comedy: Betty White and William Shatner, last seen together on Shatner's Comedy Central roast.
White plays Rhonda Delight, founder of the best-selling Mrs. Delight line of home-furnishing, kitchen and cookware products. Mrs. Delight is an empire unto herself - think of her as having been Martha Stewart when Martha Stewart was still in knee-socks.
Rhonda, a long-time widow, is in her mid-80s but still on top of her game. And she is still the queen-bee of her empire, first seen in her elaborately homey Manhattan office, getting ready to head to her grandson's wedding in Minneapolis, her hometown.
She checks last-minute arrangements with her sassy assistant Gerald, who has Rhonda's entire life in his iPad (Rhonda herself is barely computer-literate). That includes press requests for interviews when she gets to Minneapolis (she's turning them all down) and hotel and flight arrangements for Rhonda and her current boyfriend, 45-year-old Burton, a celebrity chef who has a show on Rhonda's cable network.
Rhonda arrives in Minneapolis and checks into her hotel with Gerald and Burton. But Burton comes down with a bad case of food poisoning - bad clams on the show he taped that day before leaving town - and so Rhonda heads off to the rehearsal dinner by herself, with Gerald in tow to handle the final details for the dinner, which Rhonda is hosting.
She arrives to discover that her grandson Frank is marrying Linda, whose maternal grandfather is Ted (Shatner) - an old beau of Rhonda's from the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Ted is now widowed, the aging but entrenched local columnist for the Minneapolis newspaper, where he's been for 30 years.
But as the story comes out - and we see in flashback - Ted, who is about a decade younger than Rhonda, had his first fling with her in the 1950s, when he was a young assistant at a magazine where Rhonda was an editor. They met again in the 1960s, when Ted was a star reporter for a national magazine, doing a story on Rhonda and the beginnings of her empire - and came close to marrying (Rhonda was widowed with a young child). But Ted wasn't ready for commitment. And they hooked up once more in the 1970s, when they struck sparks at a journalism convention, with Ted finally deciding not to leave his then-new marriage for someone who was so much more successful. His ego couldn't take it.
OK, so that's the set-up; there's much more. Inevitably, hijinks ensue over the course of the long wedding weekend - which starts with the rehearsal dinner on Friday night and continues through the wedding on Sunday and the reception afterward. There are, naturally, twists and turns involving Burton, Gerald, the marrying grandkids, the parents of the wedding couple, even the other grandparents. Rhonda and Ted strike sparks, then rub each other the wrong way before finally reconnecting for good. He may even wind up saving his job from being downsized at the newspaper by being the only one who can bring in an interview with Rhonda Delight.
I'm open to bids.