Just when you thought Hollywood was safe from further dabbling in crop circles, along come plans for a film about the two retired hoax claimants of yesteryear…


Not content with having hoisted first ‘Signs’ and then the hideous but mercifully unreleased ‘A Place to Stay’ on us, the movie world is apparently considering another foray into cerealogical matters. This time it may be coming in the shape of a ‘romantic comedy’ about those two ‘lovable rogues’ (ie. con-men) Doug and Dave, the pensioners who came forward in 1991 to claim that they had begun the whole crop circle mystery with their ropes and planks, despite this being a patent untruth given the many archive reports of crop circles going back many years before their time, and their complete inability to replicate the type of formation they laid claim to.

Playing the duo, of all people, are supposedly… Sean Connery and Michael Caine!

The press release, as recently featured on the website for the movie magazine ‘Empire’, reads:

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“Actor/Director Bill Paxton has a cunning plan to bring the British icons Sean Connery and Michael Caine together for a romantic comedy. “I'm working on a great British romantic comedy to team up Sean Connery and Michael Caine,” he told us. “It's called ‘Doug and Dave’ and it's a real ‘Midsummer's Night Dream’ telling of two painters from Wiltshire who started the crop circle hoax in the Seventies.”

[ http://www.empireonline.co.uk/news/news.asp?story=4831 ]


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This alone tells you that there will be no room for any doubts about whether their claims were authentic or not. It is likely that the myths of Doug and Dave will be presented as a true story of sorts. It will be the debunkers’ dream, of course, leaving croppies to pick up the pieces for years after. As we have seen so many times before, just when you think the Doug and Dave myth has been consigned to history’s dustbin, up it pops again, like the beast you just can’t kill in… the movies.

Where the ‘romantic’ in all this will get to play its part remains to be seen – presumably the role of the wives in the Doug and Dave story will be elevated somewhat (the real wives claim, incidentally, that they never knew what their spouses were up to… every night of every summer?!). ‘Comedy’ no-one can argue with, because their claims were always pure comedy anyway.

Whether Connery will be creating his circles “shaken, not stirred”, or, as Jason Porthouse remarks, Caine will get to cry “You were only meant to blow the bloody nodes off!” remains to be seen.