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Newly formed LA-based production company RendezVous launched by commercials director Kevin Dole has lined up its inaugural project, romantic comedy Kiss The Frog.

Dole has used his dual US-French citizenship to secure the backing of Film France on the sub-$10m project, which has been scheduled for an April 2010 start in an undetermined locale in France.

Media 8 will handle international sales and the producers are out to cast. Dole co-wrote the screenplay with Bob Griffard and Robert Huttinger and will produce with Bonnie Bruckheimer.

Stephan Manpearl will serve as executive producer and supervise marketing on the film. Funding comes from equity investors, French subsidies, European soft money and select international pre-sales through Media 8. The producers hope to announce a North American distributor at AFM.

Kiss The Frog follows the journey of a 35-year-old American marketing executive from Texas who travels to a remote French village in search of her real father and unexpectedly falls in love with a celebrated snail farmer.

“France is a country which has been committed to the art of cinema for over 100 years and we work diligently to support this native industry and encourage the production of French films,” Franck Priot, deputy director of Film France said.

“This production would almost entirely be shot in France, and Mr Dole intends to hire many French cast and crew. In our experience, such a commitment to the use of French resources coming from a foreign film, especially an American film, is exceptional.”

“Kiss The Frog is a film from the heart, with heart,” Dole said. “We look forward to creating not only a beautiful and funny film but a intercultural experience. Similar to Under The Tuscan Sun while comically escalating in the vein of Waking Ned Devine, Kiss The Frog blends romantic intrigue and colourful characters with the appeal of the French countryside and seductive cuisine.”

http://www.screendaily.com/news/production/new-la-based-rendezvous-lines-up-french-shoot-for-rom-com-kiss-the-frog/5006543.article

How vampires got all touchy-feely
By Brendan O’Neill

With the hit film Twilight, the transformation of vampires from terrifying, bloodsucking killers to sensitive, emotionally-intelligent, misunderstood souls, is complete. How was Bram Stoker’s legacy so drastically betrayed?

When you hear the word “vampire”, what image comes to mind? Men in black cloaks, with pasty faces, protruding fangs and an insatiable desire to feast on people’s blood?

Strange Transylvanians who sleep in coffins by day and flap around like bats at night? Perhaps you think of gangs of the undead, who are scared of garlic and can only be killed by having a wooden stake driven through their hearts.

Well, think again. The vampire has had a makeover. He’s no longer a weird, threatening foreigner, with a strange voice and even stranger dining habits – the vampire has become super-cool, lusted after by girls and envied by boys.

The movie Twilight, which topped the US box office earlier this year, and receives its UK release on Friday, is an adaptation of the first in a series of teenage vampire novels by American author Stephanie Meyer.

It tells the story of a human girl, Bella (played by Kristen Stewart), who falls in love with a 108-year-old vampire who looks like a 17-year-old boy, Edward (played by rising Brit heartthrob and former Harry Potter star, Robert Pattinson).

Edward is no Dracula-style neck-chomper who devours the human girl and terrifies the cinema audience. He’s a cool, handsome, trendy school student, and a “vegetarian vampire” – that is, he resists his inner desire to drink human blood and feasts only on animals instead.

This is a story, not of beastly excess, but of heroic restraint: Edward suppresses both his lust for blood and his physical desire for Bella, even refusing to kiss her in case he is tempted to “bite and drink”.

It seems the vampire is no longer a marauding hunter of unsuspecting humans; instead he is a symbol of celibacy and common sense.

And unlike many other vampire films, the “victim” in this one – human teen Bella – is not scared of Edward and his family of cold-skinned, beautiful vampires. In fact, she wants to join them. The chase is reversed: the human pursues the vampire, and the vampire resists.

On its US release last month, Twilight raked in $35.7m (£24.36m) on its first day – the highest-ever opening-day gross for a non-sequel or non-summer movie. And judging by the screaming teenage fans at its London premiere this week, it will do very brisk business when it goes on general release in the UK on 19 December.

FAMOUS VAMPIRES
Count von Count of Sesame Street
Count von Count (Sesame Street)
Tom Cruise (Interview with the Vampire)
Kiefer Sutherland (The Lost Boys)
Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee (Dracula)
David Boreanaz (Angel in Buffy)
Wesley Snipes (Blade)
Richard E Grant (The Little Vampire)

So how did the vampire go from being the stuff of nightmares to the object of young girls’ dreams – from a figure of evil to a desirable outsider?

Edward in Twilight is not really the first “vegetarian vampire”, struggling to contain his dark desires.

In cult television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that began in the late 1990s, Angel, played by David Boreanaz, had a conscience and a soul, and resisted the desire to drink human blood, living on pig’s blood instead. Angel is also an example of the decent, desirable vampire, who even assists (and flirts) with the vampire slayer.

For Milly Williamson, author of The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the changing cultural depictions of vampires reveals much about human society itself.

There has been a “general shift”, she says, from the vampire as exotic foreigner – as depicted in Romantic poetry in the 19th Century and most famously in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula – to the vampire as edgy “outsider”.

“From the 1970s, the vampire has achieved a cool, bad boy, exotic and sexy image”, she says. “And he has become a sympathetic creature, someone we feel for.”

This is not entirely new, she points out. Right from the Romantic period in the 19th Century, when there was widespread fascination with Eastern European “vampyrs”, the vampire has been a “pathos-filled creature who has been at odds with his ontology and his innate desires, and who has struggled with them”, says Williamson.

Yet it is significant, she says, that this aspect of vampire lore has risen to prominence since the 1970s.

“The vampire is a rich and very flexible symbol of so many different things”, she says. “He can be a threat to us and our everyday lives – or he can be an enticement away from our everyday lives.

“It is interesting that in the 1980s, in the era of Reagan and Thatcher, the vampire even became a kind of symbol of family values. The vampire films The Lost Boys and Near Dark [both released in 1987] are really about holding families together, whether it’s the vampire family or the human family.”

Yet, she points out, even in those movies the vampires retained the post-1970s outsider appeal. In The Lost Boys the vampires are cool indie kids with peroxide blonde hair; in Near Dark they are cowboy types who flirt, drink and play pool on the outskirts of Oklahoma.

For Williamson, the key to this shift in the depiction of vampires – from something threatening to something tantalising – lies in the social upheavals of the 1960s.

“The counterculture changed the way we view those who are ‘outside’ of traditional society”, she says. “It celebrated ‘outsider status’ rather than denigrating it.”

It is striking, she says, that after the rise of the counterculture, that “ultimate cultural outsider” – the vampire, who stalks and feasts on the ordinary humans of mainstream society – starts to look “more acceptable, even sympathetic”.

Bruce McClelland agrees. “What changes is not so much the vampire, but rather our attitudes toward being outsiders, heretics,” says the self-proclaimed “vampirologist” and author of Slayers and their Vampires: A History of the Killing the Dead.

From his extensive studies of the cult of the vampire, McClelland says that the word “vampir” emerged in Slavic societies around the 15th Century to describe those considered to be outside the Christian community.

And in different times, for different reasons, this “outsider” status of the vampire has been feared or embraced in cultural depictions, he says.

He argues that for many Romantics and leftists in the 19th Century, the vampire became a symbol of industrial society sapping people’s will. Dracula was first published during the Industrial Revolution, he notes.

More recently, the Goth movement adopted vampire imagery because they “identified with the scapegoat aspect of the vampire, who is always outside of society”, says Mr McClelland.

The vampire has remained quite consistent, he says; it is our attitude to outsiders that shifts back and forth.

And now, with Twilight, we seem to have the ultimate mainstreaming of “outsider status”. But not everyone is enamoured of the new vegetarian, celibate vampires that have usurped the terrifying figures of old. Nina Auerbach, author of Our Vampires, Ourselves plants herself firmly in the traditional camp.

“Books and movies directed at teenage girls, like Twilight, are always homogenous by definition,” she says. “I vote for the scaries.”

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Producer sets up $200 mil film fund
Financing largely from private Russian equity
By ALI JAAFAR

Russian producer Leonid Minkovsky, whose finance and production shingle Ramco has Mischa Barton starrer “You and I” at Cannes, is setting up a $200 million film fund largely financed with private Russian equity.

The fund will finance predominantly English-language features for the international market; it already has a clutch of projects in development, including romantic comedies “Kiss the Frog” and “Connecting With Jack Gabriel.”

Minkovsky is in talks with Robin Wright Penn to play the lead female role in “Kiss the Frog” while Nick Guthe (“Mini’s First Time”) is attached to direct “Connecting With Jack Gabriel.”

Ramco is looking to begin production on “Kiss the Frog” this summer with lensing set to start on “Connecting With Jack Gabriel” in the fall.

Minkovsky has tapped two Russian businessmen for half the coin, and is seeking the rest of the financing from international sources.

Ramco has a strategic partnership with Russian web NTV, the third-largest broadcaster in the country.

“The majority of the money will be coming from Russian-based private equity,” Minkovsky told Variety. “We have a slate of projects which we’re currently working on. There are a lot of wealthy Russians around and most of them are unknowns.”

Minkovsky is also in talks with a U.S. studio about inking an output deal for films that are produced out of the fund.

Ramco stands for the Russian American Movie Co. It previously produced “Captivity.”

from Daily Variety, Cannes Edition Day 4, May 17th 2008

Vampire Wedding, the romantic horror comedy film project by Castalides Pictures, is making its debut at the Cannes Marche du Film 2008.

Story is “young heartbroken wedding planner is hired to arrange legendary silent movie stars wedding and finds out that she is part of an evil plan to build a vampire empire where the sun never rises”

The picture is actively seeking production partners, as well as financing and distribution deals. To request a meeting at the Marche du Film 2008 please contact: info@vampireweddingmovie.com

Yves Lavandier’s “Writing Drama: A Comprehensive Guide for Playwrights and Scriptwriters”, translated from the French by Bernard Besserglik, is by far the most comprehensive book available on the subject of screenwriting coming from a European author. Instead of giving the reader a set of fixed rules to craft his story by, as most of his American colleagues do, Lavandier approaches drama and the rules thereof, in an academic although pragmatic way, that not only provides the reader with extensive footnotes on every page, but also with deep insights on origin, theory and method of drama and storytelling since the dawn of mankind. Lavandier’s ideas inspire with each and every page, they invite to break dramatic rules and experiment with story and structure while utilizing clever dialogue in order to tell compelling stories. While the book takes the interested reader on a tour through the famed halls of European drama by analyzing the classic works of the likes of Hitchcock and Moliere, it also readily delivers hundreds of examples and references from some of the most influential and best films of all time. Lavanider discusses the great works of Lubitsch, Gabin, Godard, Renoir, Truffaut, Altmann to name only a few. One is tempted to think that whoever doesn’t show in this book, has probably never created a work of substance or quoted the famous “include me out” in order to be left out. Be it the teachings of Jung or Kafka’s magical realism, be it the writings of Brecht or Beckett, Lavandier understands to cross reference and lay out the entire world of drama in front of the interested reader. Lavandiers “Writing Drama” is the perfect companion for anyone interested in universal storytelling. If you have already read through the armies of screenwriting bibles from LA to NY, if neither MacKee nor Syd Field has made you rich quick yet, perhaps you should rethink your take on storytelling and go back to the start, join the masterminds of European storytelling, which happen to be the same minds that formed Hollywood during the first half of the 20th century. Not only is “Writing Drama” the most comprehensive book on the subject, it is also a lonesome star sparkling far above the vast crowd of cookie cutter recipe books on how to make dough in Hollywood. While I do not recommend the book as a beginners guide to screenwriting, it makes for a perfect reference book and lifelong companion to the dedicated storyteller. Consider.

(Review by Robert Huttinger)

In loving memory of my grandmother Edith Hüttinger, nee Edith Halpern, who was born on August 30th, 1913 in the city of Vienna, Austria to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. She lived through two world wars, as well as a monarchy, a dictatorship and a democracy. Of Jewish descent, she did not follow her father into emigration to Sweden in 1938 but decided to stay with her sister in Vienna, where she worked in a fabric and sewing store in the second district. She fell in love with her roommate, a medical student from the middle east and colleague to her later husband. In 1942, shortly after she got pregnant, the student died under unclear circumstances without ever seeing his native country again. Although the Gestapo made clear to her, that neither she nor her yet unborn son are going to survive, she decided to keep the child, choosing life over despair, knowing deep inside that the Nazis can’t be around forever. After the war she was finally allowed to marry Dr. Karl Maria Hüttinger, an Austrian doctor she befriended in 1937, whose relations helped her avoiding deportation and certain death.

She passed away peacefully on January 19th, 2008 at age 94.

Hers is the story of a century of betrayal, deceit, despair, survival, joy, passion and love. A story as complex and simple as life itself. A story she passed on to me and a story yet to be told.