Sony Pictures is looking to bring the classic 1970s Norm Lear-produced sitcom Good Times to the big screen. The studio and producer Scott Rudin has hired Wreck-It Ralph screenwriter Phil Johnston to craft a script about a working-class black family living in the Chicago projects, struggling to make ends meet.
The series was a spin-off of the comedy Maude which itself was a spin-off of the classic All In The Family. (Such was the popularity of virtually any show that Lear produced.) It ran for six seasons.
As a Lear-produced sitcom, Good Times was known for tackling social issues of the day with a healthy dose of laughs. It also served as the launching pad for comic JJ Walker’s career, whose show catchphrase – “Dy-no-mite!” – was virtually omnipresent in the mid-to-late 1970s. A young Janet Jackson joined the show’s cast for the last two seasons.
Interestingly, Deadline is reporting that the film will be set in the 1960s, a decade earlier than the setting for the TV series, though I will grant that that decade has no shortage of social issues that could be addressed in the film.
