Tony Grisoni Tagged Articles at Cinematical
Terry Gilliam is Back to Work on 'Don Quixote'
Filed under: Drama », Scripts »
By now, we're all used to potential cinema disappointments. The Internet makes it ridiculously easy to learn about projects as they happen, but it also means getting excited for features that drown in development hell. For a while, Terry Gilliam's Don Quixote was one of those doomed projects. (You can follow some of the struggle right here.) Now, it's happening? It's really, really happening?Empire reports that Gilliam has started prepping a new script for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, after finally getting the rights back. Partner Tony Grisoni said: "I re-read the greatest script ever written and realize we gotta get rewriting! I really wanna knock that one out in the next month or so." But it won't just be some script polishing -- Gilliam says that he has "some very different ideas" for the film, and that this whole, almost decade-long mess could be a blessing: "[I'm] starting to think I was lucky, because maybe the film will be better seven years later. It will have matured a bit longer."
I'm not sure how "seven" fits in to a production that dates back to 2000, but regardless, this is excellent news topped off with the fact that he wants to get shooting later this year. Finally, after all this time, the famous Spaniard will get his moment to shine, and it looks like patience will be a wonderful virtue.
Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, & Anand Tucker Take on the Yorkshire Ripper
Filed under: Drama », Deals », Scripts »
While the collection of features that began with Red Road never got off the ground, the UK is trying again, with a different sort of feature. (One that will hopefully be fully completed and released.) Forget about a long drama like Zodiac -- Variety reports that three directors have signed on to helm films about the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper in the 1970s and early 1980s -- each taking a certain time-span of the crimes, based on David Peace's collection of books called Red Riding Quartet. The books were adapted by Tony Grisoni, who did a heck of a job on the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas adaptation, with Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane) to cover Nineteen Seventy-Four, James Marsh (Man on Wire) to tackle Nineteen Eighty, and Anand Tucker (Shopgirl) to helm the final installment, Nineteen Eighty-Three. (Nineteen Seventy Seven will be split amongst the three other features.) The films will be brought together into a television series, with a theatrical release to follow (one that hopefully includes overseas distribution).
The tale of the Yorkshire Ripper -- Peter William Sutcliffe -- is pretty grisly. (Check that link for the whole story.) He was convicted in 1981, and while he is still alive, he has gotten a bit of the "eye for an eye" treatment from fellow criminals.
Samantha Morton Heads Back to Childhood for Directorial Debut
Filed under: Drama », Independent », Scripts », DIY/Filmmaking »
Last we heard about Samantha Morton, Christopher Campbell was praising her work in Control. Now the Daily Mail reports that she's about to direct her first feature with Revolution Films-- one that will not only have her traverse the world behind the camera, but also travel through her own past. The film is currently called The Unloved, and she is working on the script with Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas).Morton says: "The story will be fictionalised, but it's my story. The things that happened to me in care will be there, but I think it's easier to tell it if it's fictionalised, because I'm going to weave in other stories about other kids." Still, it should prove to be an immensely personal project, and I have a feeling that it won't be overly saccharine and sentimental. We must remember that this is the woman who reminisced about "a drama club story about a young Morton taking improv too far -- 'He whispered, 'The other girl's stolen your hamster.' So I beat the crap out of this girl and they didn't ask me back.'"
If she can keep the snark along with the dramatic punch, this could be a fine flick. Morton isn't sure if she'll take a role in the film herself, but casting should commence soon, once the script is completed, and they're looking to begin production in September.
Death Defying Acts and Other AFM Deals
Filed under: Drama », Foreign Language », Deals », Sundance », Cannes », Distribution », The Weinstein Co. », Cinematical Indie »
If you feel like you've been hearing a lot of news lately about movie distribution deals, that's because the annual American Film Market (AFM) has been going on in Santa Monica for the past week. The AFM website claims that more than $800 million in deals are made every year at the industry event. Three more distribution deals have just been announced:- The Weinstein Company bought the U.S. distribution rights to Death Defying Acts, a feature about the life of illusionist Harry Houdini. Perhaps the recent success of The Prestige and The Illusionist inspired the deal. The film is directed by Gillian Armstrong and stars Guy Pearce as Houdini, who becomes involved with a psychic played by Catherine Zeta-Jones. One of the writers is Tony Grisoni, whose writing credits include Brothers of the Head, Tideland, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Armstrong is good at turning a biography into an interesting movie, as with My Brilliant Career, and the combination of her direction and Grisoni's writing has suddenly made me twice as interested as I would normally be in a film about Houdini. (Okay, Guy Pearce was also an influence.) TWC intends to premiere the film at Cannes in 2007.
- Palm Pictures picked up the North American rights to distribute Solo Dios Sabe (Only God Knows), a Brazilian drama that debuted at Sundance earlier this year. Palm plans to release the film in theaters in early 2007. The film stars Alice Braga (City of God) and Diego Luna (Y Tu Mama Tambien) as a Brazilian student and Mexican journalist travelling together.
- Strand Releasing acquired the North American rights to White Palms, a Hungarian movie about young gymnasts. The movie is Hungary's entry in the Academy Awards' Foreign Language Film category for 2006. Strand is apparently betting the movie will make the cut to the final Oscar nominations and subsequently garner more publicity. White Palms sounds fascinating to me, as it contrasts Eastern European and North American methods of training young athletes in gymnatics. I'm looking forward to the chance to see the film.
Another Dick Biopic!
Filed under: Comedy », Drama », Independent », Sci-Fi & Fantasy », Casting », Newsstand », Cinematical Indie »
In the 45th case this year of (at least) two competing movies about the same historical figure being made at the same time, another biopic of sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick has been announced, just weeks after news of a similar film surfaced. The first Dick biopic (That just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?) was written and will be directed by 1980s one-hit wonder Matthew Wilder, and stars boring Bill Pullman as Dick. Wilder's film, entitled Panasonic, will reportedly be a comedy in which "The lines between reality and perfection blur ... Paranoid conspiracy theories of the highest order, drug-fueled interdimensional shifts, and 1970s pop-culture combine for the mind-bending adventure of the century." Got that?The new Dick project, on the other hand, is fully authorized by Dick's estate, and is being co-produced by the estate's Electric Shepherd Prods. Currently untitled, the film is described as a "nontraditional biopic [which] will interweave the prolific author's life with his fiction and incorporate elements of his last unfinished novel, The Owl in Daylight", and will be written by Tony Grisoni (who, having also helped write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, seems the perfect choice). The increasingly prolific Paul Giamatti, already on board as a producer, is currently in negotiations to star in the film.
There's no word yet on a start date for either project, but since the screenplay for Panasonic is already done, that one would seem to have a head start.
SXSW Review: Brothers of the Head
Filed under: Independent », Music & Musicals », SXSW », Cinematical Indie »
I could not resist a feature film about conjoined twins who are pressed into forming a Seventies rock band. And when I agreed to see it, I didn't yet know that Brothers of the Head was directed by the guys who made Lost in La Mancha, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, and was adapted from a Brian Aldiss novel by Tony Grisoni, who co-scripted Tideland, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the unfinished Don Quixote movie with Terry Gilliam. It sounded overall like my kind of movie, and I was not disappointed.
Brothers of the Head is a documentary-style narrative (the term "mockumentary" doesn't fit this movie) about Tom and Barry Howe, conjoined twins who were raised by a father and older sister on a remote coastal area of Britain. In their late teens, they are discovered by a music-industry impresario, who practically buys the boys from their father to front a rock band. He isolates them in a huge Oxfordshire mansion with other musicians and eventually they transform into sullen, angry, brutally attractive rockers. The impresario obviously had something genteel and clean-cut in mind, but the twins' music is edgy and raw, early punk rock.
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