Just several months after Dreamworks won the rights for a movie adaptation of Gay Talese's The Voyeur's Hotel, the project has been already scrapped. Sam Mendes planned to direct it with Steven Spielberg as producer, but after watching a documentary tackling the same subject, the movie adaptation has been dropped as per Deadline.
In a new twist to the already controversial The Voyeur's Hotel, the movie adaptation was cancelled because of the existence of a documentary that Mendes and Dreamworks were not previously aware of, as per Deadline.
The story itself has been the subject of controversy since Gay Talese published an article about it in the New Yorker in April. Talese writes about Gerald Foos, a former hotelier who claims to be a long-time voyeur of his guests. Foos says that he bought a hotel just so he can watch people having sex. At one point, Foos even becomes an implicit accomplice of murder after he steals the stash of a drug dealer, who blames his girlfriend and strangles her instead. When the story broke out, it attracted so much attention and led to a bidding war for the movie rights, which Dreamworks eventually won. However, Talese and Foos did not inform Dreamworks or Mendes that a documentary was also being made by Myles Kand and Josh Koury, as per Deadline.
When Mendes finally watched the documentary, the decision to drop a movie adaptation for The Voyeur's Hotel was made right away, per Deadline. Mendes goes on to say that "What we know now...I've now seen the documentary, and it is as much a part of the story as Gerald Foos, Gay Talese, and the motel." He adds that "In order to tell the true story, with any authenticity, it would need to involve the documentary team. The documentary is really part of the story, in the sense there are things that happen that were spurred on, even suggested by the documentarians. So the story became infinitely more interesting and more complicated, but impossible to tell in a narrative movie."
