features in development
Based on the best-selling biography Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert Shaper of Nationas, QUEEN OF THE DESERT is a romance and adventure film in the tradition of OUT OF AFRICA and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.
Gertrude Bell has been called the female Lawrence of Arabia, which, while not inaccurate, fails to give Gertrude Bell her due. She was at one time the most powerful woman in the British Empire: a nation builder, the driving force behind the creation of modern-day Iraq. Born in 1868 into a world of privilege, Bell turned her back on Victorian society, choosing to read history at Oxford and going on to become an archaeologist, spy, Arabist, linguist, author (of Persian Pictures, The Desert and the Sown, and many other collections), poet, photographer, and legendary mountaineer (she took off her skirt and climbed the Alps in her underclothes).
She traveled the globe several times, but her passion was the desert, where she traveled with only her guns and her servants. Her vast knowledge of the region made her indispensable to the Cairo Intelligence Office of the British government during World War I. She advised the Viceroy of India; then, as an army major, she traveled to the front lines in Mesopotamia. There, she supported the creation of an autonomous Arab nation for Iraq, promoting and manipulating the election of King Faisal to the throne and helping to draw the borders of the fledgling state. Gertrude Bell, vividly told and impeccably researched by Georgina Howell, is a richly compelling portrait of a woman who transcended the restrictions of her class and times, and in so doing, created a remarkable and enduring legacy.
"On the cover of this book is an arresting photograph taken in front of the Sphinx in March 1921, on the last day of the Cairo conference on the Middle East. It shows Gertrude Bell astride a camel, flanked by Winston Churchill and T. E. Lawrence. She wears a look of some assurance and satisfaction, perhaps because -- apart from having spent far more time on camelback than either man -- she has just assisted at the birth of a new country, which is to be called Iraq." From The Woman Who Made Iraq by Christopher Hitchens
Based on the best selling biography Saint Exupery: A Biography by Stacy Schiff (Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Great Improvosation) SAINT-EX is an adventure film about the iconoclastic French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
Written by Eric Jendresen (BAND OF BROTHERS) SAINT-EX combines the daredevil action and camaraderie of the pioneering Airmail pilots in the 1920's with the heroic, romantic and humorous aspects of these young men's experiences.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry disappeared at age forty-four during a reconnaissance flight over southern France. At the time he was best known for a career of daring flights over the Sahara, the Pyrenees, and Patagonia and for his contributions to the science of aviation. But the solitary hours he spent above the earth in open cockpit airplanes gave birth to a more famous legacy, a series of enchanting, autobiographical novels and the classic story The Little Prince, still the most translated book in the French language.
An impoverished aristocrat from one of France's oldest families, Saint-Exupéry moved at age twenty-seven to the western Sahara Desert, to live alone in a plank shack and manage the way station for the Aéropostale, the French mail service. His careers as a novelist and an aviator were born here, and his life once he returned to Europe was definedwith brilliant and catastrophic resultsby the sense of isolated fascination and curiosity he developed in the desert.
"The predicament of his birth is summed up by one encyclopedia in two words, "impoverished aristocrat": Antoine de Saint-Exupéry began his professional life as a truck salesman. By 1929 he had distinguished himself as a pilot and published a first novel. Before another five years had passed he was unemployed, living hand-to-mouth. In 1939 he won both the American Bookseller Association's National Book Award and the Académie Française's Grand Prix du Roman for Wind, Sand and Stars; he seemed well on his way to a chair at the Académie Française. Five years later his politics more accurately his lack thereof made him so much a persona non grata that he lived in disgrace in Algiers, heartbroken and excommunicated, his books censored. That year he became the most famous French writer to go down as a casualty of World War II. He was forty-four." Stacy Schiff: Introduction to "Saint-Exupéry: A Biography
ALL GOOD CHILDREN is based on the best-selling novel, JOHN DOLLAR by Marianne Wiggins, that the New York Times called "a powerful story that not only pulls you through to its final pages, but also propels you back to the beginning again, where you find you want to follow her decent into hell a second time."
Set in Burma after the First World War, this dark drama follows the classic story line of Lord of the Flies, as eight British schoolgirls become marooned on an obscure island with the Captain of their expedition. It is a tragic tale of love, betrayal, survival and innocence lost.
Charlotte Lewes, a young Briton newly widowed by the Great War, departs for colonial Burma in 1917 to escape the ruins of her life. As a schoolteacher in Rangoon she is rejuvenated by the sensuous Oriental climate, and she meets John Dollar, a sailor who becomes her passionate love and whose ill-fated destiny inextricably binds her to him. On a festive seafaring expedition, the tightly knit British community confronts disaster in the shape of an earthquake and ensuing tidal wave. Swept overboard, Charlotte, John Dollar, and eight young girls who are Charlotte's pupils awake on a remote island beach. As they struggle to stay alive, their dependence on John overwhelms him, and an atmosphere of menace and doom builds, culminating in shocking and riveting scenes of both death and survival.
"Described by the author as a "female Lord of the Flies ," this book is every bit as chilling and brutal as Golding's. The last 20 pages of the book are spine tingling. Wiggins (wife of Salman Rushdie) has given her readers an uncomfortably clear picture of a society in which great gentility and dark human conduct coexist. It is both thought-provoking and horrifying. Its dark, disturbing message about life on a primitive, lawless basis is neither easy to acknowledge nor easy to dismiss."
- Barbara Weathers, School Library Journal
A national bestseller about a group of girls stranded on a desert island. "A superb novel, hypnotic, disturbing and artful . . . so good that most readers will want to devour it in one gulp."--Washington Post Book World "Richly imaginative . . . pure adventure."
--San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle
Of this "mesmerizing" tale of eight shipwrecked British schoolgirls, their governess and her eponymous lover, a sailor, PW observed, "Wiggins strips away the veneer of civilization to reveal the raw, primitive heart of nature and human nature.
- Publishers Weekly
An original screenplay by Cristina Colissimo, MODERN ENGLISH is written in the spirit of screwball comedies of the 1930's. Wade Rawlins, Britains top undercover gossip columnist, has just been scooped for the first time in his life. Determined not to lose his edge and his job, his editor, Harold, sets him off to get the real story behind the scandal involving stunning young animal-portrait artist Geraldine "Gerry" Kilburn.
Life, and the eccentric Kilburn family, however, have other plans for Wade when, through a series of hilarious mishaps, he winds up disheveled and stripped of his identity on the doorstep of the Kilburns remote sheep farm.
Mistaking Wade for a charity case, the charmingly eccentric Lady Kilburn takes him in to the distress of the rest of her family. Upon meeting Lady Kilburn's fiery eldest daughter, Gerry, Wade realizes where he is and plays along with the misunderstanding. When the Kilburns mischievous younger daughter, Marian, discovers who Wade really is, she sets in motion a secret plan to undo him.
Perfectly positioned to get the inside story that will save his career, Wade finds himself falling head over heels in love with Gerry. When he then discovers that the land-rich cash-poor Kilburn's are being forced to auction off their beloved family home, he is faced with a major dilemma -- to write or not to write.
Can anyone recall one recall the last great screwball romantic comedy?
The closest film to that genre may be YOUVE GOT MAIL with its cute meet on the Internet. However, there hasnt been such a great face-to-face cute meet in a long time as that between Wade and Gerry. While the term screwball romantic comedy often conjures up the old films of Judy Holliday, orclassics such as BRINGING UP BABY with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, this genre is far too often dismissed in contemporary filmmaking.
