At the Television Critics Association panel for “The Newsroom” I was excited to hear Jeff Daniels talk about the Aaron Sorkin series. But I also wanted to know some very important movie news. So after the panel, I joined the scrum of reporters on stage, and after Daniels discussed the nobility of news, I asked him what he thought of Jim Carey backing out of Dumb and Dumber 2. And it’s good news! There’s still hope for the film to shoot next year.
“Oh sure, even more so now,” Daniels said. “Jim wants to do it. I want to do it. The Farrellys want to do it. They want to rewrite the script a little bit and they aren’t trying to jam it in before I have to go back and do ‘Newsroom’ in November. So they’re going, ‘Why don’t we just do it right? Let’s get everybody organized to go next May or June.’ If everything works out on the business side, that’s what we’ll do but I think there’s more hope than ever.”
Daniels said Carrey backed out of the current schedule for understandable reasons, but isn’t out for good. “I understood why, because this has been a year and a half of a whole bunch of are we, aren’t we, what’s going on, yeah the script’s funny, no it’s not, now we have to have notes. So I think Jim just got frustrated and I completely got it. I was frustrated too. We thought it was in pretty good shape. The studio and others wanted some more work done it. The Farrellys wanted more work done on it so they got working on it and I think last week they decided to push the shooting of it to next year, possibly because I wasn’t going to move ‘The Newsroom.’”
We’ll be back with more on Dumb and Dumber 2 at 10pm, not 10am.
