In "Nurse Betty," he started a wacky amnesia comedy with a brutal murder. In his debut film, "In the Company of Men," his lead character (played by Aaron Eckhart) was a misogynist and racist who, in the end, came out on top. Similarly bad and manipulative people populated "Your Friends and Neighbors" and "The Shape of Things."

In comparison, the taboo being broken with LaBute's latest, "The Wicker Man," is minor: He's just attempting to remake a cult classic.

"For me, doing a remake didn't really stick in a negative sense," the filmmaker, playwright and one-time Brigham Young University grad student said during a recent visit to Salt Lake City. "There was no sense of, 'Oh, gosh, I don't want to repeat somebody else's work.' I felt like I was going to legitimately do something different."

LaBute chalks this up to his theater experience. In the theater, he said, it's common to reinterpret plays. Salt Lake's Pygmalion Productions is putting on a production of LaBute's play "Fat Pig" in September, and everybody does and redoes Shakespeare.

The difference, though, is that theater is in the moment, and what happens on a stage is ephemeral. Movies, on the other hand, leave behind evidence that is seen years later. And movies that become classics or develop a cult following - like that behind the 1973 British thriller "The Wicker Man" - will have fans (and even the original's makers) nervous when someone comes along to remake them.

The original "Wicker Man" starred Edward Woodward (later known as TV's "The Equalizer") as a Scotland Yard detective sent to a remote Scottish island to investigate a schoolgirl's disappearance. He finds a neo-pagan society led by the creepy Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee).

The remake, which opens nationwide Friday, moves the setting to a remote Northwest town (it was actually filmed in British Columbia). It stars Nicolas Cage as the cop and Ellen Burstyn as Sister Summerisle.

"What [the producers] were looking for was a legitimately different take on this movie," LaBute said. "I didn't want to remake it shot for shot, or take the screenplay and just update it and make an American version. I have to have some other way in, some new take on the material. When I approached them with this reverse of the sexes, that it would be this matriarchal society . . . all of that, I think, seemed to trigger their sense that I was wanting to head off in a very different direction - still wanting to get to where the original movie got. We all felt the [original's] ending was hugely important to us."

Is LaBute's new movie any good? I can't say, because I haven't seen it - and I won't see it until opening day. "The Wicker Man" will be the 17th movie to open this year without being pre-screened for critics nationally. (Another movie opening Friday, the action movie "Crank," is No. 18.)

Opening unreviewed usually is a warning sign that a movie is terrible; think of movies like "Underworld: Evolution," "Material Girls," "Doogal" or "Zoom." (The notable exception was "Snakes on a Plane," which got generally positive reviews once critics finally saw it. Considering that movie's underwhelming opening-weekend take of $15.3 million, maybe showing it to us critics would have persuaded the fence-sitters to buy tickets.)

LaBute holds to his studio's official reasoning, though, that the movie's twists and turns might be spoiled if critics spill the beans. "[The marketing people] feel like a lot of the audience in the states don't know it, and they want them to get as fresh a take on that ending as they can," he said.

He also is confident that opening on Labor Day weekend - traditionally one of the weakest weekends for moviegoing, since most people use it for one last shot of summer sunshine - won't hurt the film. "I'm hoping for great weather every morning for people, then it sort of clouds up by noon and people will head to the theater," LaBute joked.

And once they come inside to watch his movie, LaBute hopes people can then go to the video store and rent the 1973 version. "I don't think you have to compare, you don't have to say which is [your] favorite," LaBute said. "I, in fact, hope it opens people up to the original. . . . The other one exists in a form that's untouched by what we've done with it."

---

Check out my daily blog, "The Movie Cricket," at http://blogs.sltrib.com/movies. Send questions or comments to Sean P. Means, movie critic, The Salt Lake Tribune, 90 S. 400 West, Suite 700, Salt Lake City, UT 84101, or e-mail at movies@sltrib.com.