According to the Hollywood industry trade publication “Deadline,” showbiz is abuzz with the news that Paramount Pictures is considering making a movie version of “Hawai‘i Five-0.” The brainchild of producer Leonard Freeman, the classic Island-set police procedural starred Jack Lord as Steve McGarrett, the straight arrow chief of an elite crimefighting task force in paradise, ran on CBS-TV 1968-1980. The proposed new version’s “package was put together by Entertainment 360’s Guymon Casady [producer of HBO’s “Game of Thrones”] with the estate of series creator Leonard Freeman,” Mike Fleming Jr. reported Sept. 10 in “The Dish,” the insider section of “Deadline” that breaks scoops. Paramount Pictures and CBS have a corporate relationship; both are owned by the same parent company, Paramount Skydance.
It’s fitting that Destin Daniel Cretton, the director being linked to the possible “Five-0” project, is from Haiku, Maui. Cretton’s “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” broke box office records this summer, and the Hawai‘i-born and raised helmer is red-hot right now. According to Hawaiian actor Branscombe Richmond, who has his own connection to the legendary crime production and, he says, attended the same church as Cretton on Maui: “‘Hawai‘i Five-0’ in Cretton’s hands is a great choice. I mean, he’s an Island boy, he’s from Hawai‘i Nei, he has the soul and heart of what is ticking here,” Richmond told Aloha State Daily.
“The Dish” dishes that the proposed “Five-0” screenwriters are no strangers to crime movies: Chris Bremner co-wrote two of the Will Smith/Martin Lawrence “Bad Boys” detective buddy pictures; Noah Oppenheim penned 2016’s “Jackie,” wherein Natalie Portman depicts First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy shortly after JFK’s assassination.
If Paramount Pictures moves ahead with the movie remake, this wouldn’t be the first time Tinseltown tried to bring “Hawai‘i Five-0” from the little to the big screen. From 1992-1997 Branscombe Richmond co-starred as Native American bounty hunter Bobby Sixkiller on the syndicated series “Renegade,” created by prolific producer Stephen J. Cannell, who, along with Kim LeMasters “were the guys who rebooted ‘Hawai‘i Five-0’ [in 1997]. The guy who was McGarrett was Gary Busey [monikered Jimmy Xavier Berk], and the guy who was Danno was Russell Wong. I played Napoleon DeCastro, who would have been known as the Wo Fat of that next generation,” said Richmond, interviewed in Maui by phone.
The villainous Wo Fat (Khigh Dhiegh, co-star of the 1962 thriller “The Manchurian Candidate”) was McGarrett’s arch-nemesis in the original series. In the 1997 production, DeCastro is the head of the Hawai‘i underworld and suspected of shooting James MacArthur, who’d moved on from being the Five-0 unit’s Danny Williams to the 50th State’s governor.
Along with MacArthur, the 1997 shoot brought together other “Five-0” veterans who’d portrayed characters opposite Jack Lord during the 12-year-run of the crime procedural in paradise to reprise their roles. The reunion included what Richmond called “what a great gathering of people:” Kam Fong as Detective Chin Ho Kelly; Zulu as Detective Kono Kalākaua; Harry Endo as HPD forensic scientist Che Fong; Herman Wedemeyer as HPD Sergeant Duke Lukela; and actor/musician Moe Keale as Detective Truck Kealoha.
Nevertheless, this largely forgotten Russian mob-themed production has apparently never been broadcast, theatrically released or streamed — it seems no one wanted to “Book ’em, Danno,” as McGarrett frequently told Detective Sergeant Danny Williams. Richmond believes it’s because, “Gary Busey was totally wrong for the role… After they saw it, they put it on the shelf, because you don’t want to tarnish the brand” of a legendary showbiz property.
“Deadline” surmises that another reason the 1997 film went unseen is: “They could never quite figure it out because of lawsuits with CBS and rights issues that led instead to the hit 2010-20 CBS TV series remake that starred Alex Loughlin, Scott Caan, Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park.”
It remains to be seen whether Paramount Pictures and Destin Daniel Cretton will be able to revive the production that includes one of the greatest opening montage sequences in television history, intercutting Hawai‘i’s people, places, waves and landmarks with crimefighting images, set to the unforgettable pounding beat composed by Morton Stevens, who won two Emmys for his immortal composition.
Tania Verafield is an L.A.-based stage and screen actress who acted in two films directed by Cretton before he hit it big with the Oscar-nominated 2021 kung fu epic “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” She auditioned for and was cast, along with LaKeith Stanfield (later Oscar-nominated for 2020’s “Judas and the Black Messiah”), in Cretton’s 2008 student film “Short Term 12,” which he shot while attending film school at San Diego State University and won the Sundance Film Festival’s Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking.
Verafield added that 2012’s “‘I Am Not a Hipster’ was Destin’s very first feature film. It was a story about his own family… It wasn’t a direct correlation, but the main character has three sisters, and Destin has three sisters… He went back and reused actors he’d already worked with, and I made that film with many of my friends I had worked with through him.”
As a director, Verafield says Cretton is “very softspoken, gentle, creative, joyful, found a way to make everybody feel comfortable and keeping it an easy and enjoyable set. He’s always smiling and very focused when he’s working. He is such a family man. He’s so close to his family in Hawai‘i, and he brings that familial way of being onto a set and creates a family.”
Interviewed by phone in L.A., Verafield added, “I know how important Hawai‘i is to him. He always wears Hawaiian shirts and a lei, he’s just really proud of where he came from. If he has the opportunity to work there, I know he’ll bring a lot of passion to” a big screen remake of “Hawai‘i Five-0.”
Ed Rampell and Luis Reyes are co-authors of the new book On Location in Hawai‘i.
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