According to Deadline, Spike Lee is set to direct a movie musical about the development of Viagra, based on David Kushner’s Esquire article All Rise. The article is about Pfizer accidentally stumbling on the discovery of a pill that—let’s all be grown-ups here—gives you a boner (hee hee hee) while developing a treatment for heart pain, and Lee is adapting it into a movie with British playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah. Mark Stewart and Heidi Rodewald, creators of the Tony-winning musical Passing Strange, will write the songs and music. Also, if you’re wondering why we’re not bothering with a bunch of tortured erection jokes—no judgment here, some people are into that—you’ll be happy to know that the Deadline story has a handful of them. Maybe more than a handful? It’s really not our business. Either way, coming up with jokes like that is pretty hard, which is why we’re just going to make that easy one and leave it at that.
Moving on, this will be Lee’s first musical, and he shared a lengthy and extremely enthusiastic statement with Deadline about how excited he is to do it, referring to it as a “DANCIN’, ALL SINGIN’ MUSICAL Spike Lee Joint” that is at least somewhat in honor of his mother and her insistence on making him see movies about “corny people singin’ and dancin’” when he was young. His statement, notably, does not mention Viagra, but that’s for the best since so much of it is full of nice sentiments about his mom.
On a semi-related note, it’ll be interesting to see how this ties-in with the 2010 Anne Hathaway/Jake Gyllenhaal film Love And Other Drugs, which was also partially about the creation of Viagra. Will there be a cinematic universe of Viagra movies after this? Will Pfizer be profiting from all of this? Should we have brought that up earlier because it does seem like a good point, considering how powerful these pharmaceutical companies are? Oh well.