PROJECTS IN DEVELOPMENT
FAKE CLUB
Genre: A One-Hour Dramatic Television Series
Written by Lili Anolik and Tony O'Neill
Los Angeles. The very early 1980s. A young Liverpudlian art student named Paul Fortune, along with a motley crew of artists, hustlers, outcasts and dreamers, launch the legendary FAKE CLUB out of a Trailways bus station. Paul and his band of merry Fakers know how to do decadence right. And they quickly find themselves at the nexus of a sex, drugs, rock n’ roll—and music-videos of rock n’ roll—revolution.
MTV has just launched. The video-killed-the-radio-star age is upon us. And Paul and Co, during daylight hours, are making the latest craze and can’t-last fad, music videos, often with Fake Club habitués, including Kim Carnes (“Bette Davis Eyes”), Boy George and Culture Club (“Karma Chameleon”), and very early Madonna (“Burning Up”).
In this seedily glamorous underworld, movie stars rub shoulders (and other body parts) with pop stars, porn stars and Warhol superstars; gangsters swap girlfriends and gunfire with bank robbers; and everyone is hot-wired on coke and ’ludes, and on the prowl for sex, for romance, for money, for fame and, most of all, for a high good time. FAKE CLUB is a living, breathing—not to mention a fucking, snorting—tribute to the sheen and the chic, the sleaze and the glitz of early 80s L.A.
NAILS: THE LENNY DYKSTRA STORY
Genre: Feature Documentary
Directed by Matthew Mishory
Eclipsing the traditional sports memoir, House of Nails is a tale of Shakespearian proportions—a relentlessly entertaining ride that careens from the heights to the abyss. Lenny Dykstra, nicknamed “Nails” for his hustle and grit, approached the game of baseball—and life—with mythic intensity. During his decade in the majors as a legendary member of the 1980s Mets and 1990s Phillies, he was named to three All-Star teams and played in two of the most memorable World Series of the modern era.
Then came a second act no novelist could plausibly conjure: After retiring, Dykstra became “baseball’s most improbable post-career success story” (The New Yorker). But when the real estate bubble burst in 2008, Lenny lost everything. Then the feds moved in: convicted of bankruptcy fraud (unjustly, he contends), Lenny served two and a half harrowing years in prison.
SICK CITy
A One-Hour Dramatic Television Series
Written by Tony O'Neill
SICK CITY is the story of Jeffrey and Randal, antiheroes extraordinaire. We have Jeffrey - a handsome and self-destructive street-smart operator with a death-wish infatuation with heroin. Part Johnny Thunders, part lost-boy lost, Jeffrey is the kind of guy people just want to look after… even as he’s picking their pockets in the process. Then there’s Randal - whose greatest wish is to get out from under the shadow of his famous late-father and domineering older brother and finally become his own man - far away from the stultifying expectations imposed by his famous last name… if only he can put down the pipe long enough.
Together they will concoct a plan to cash-in on the legendary Sharon Tate sex tape… a plan so devastatingly simple that it seems as if it CAN’T go wrong… until, of course, it does.
GUNNER
A One-Hour Dramatic Television Series
Based on the Aaron Gunner mystery novels by Gar Anthony Haywood.
GUNNER is a show about one man's struggle to combat the crime and injustice threatening to overwhelm his neighborhood and home: South Central Los Angeles, circa 1990. Each season will be based on one of the six Aaron Gunner mystery novels written by Gar Anthony Haywood. The first season will draw its storyline from Haywood’s debut novel FEAR OF THE DARK (winner of Best First Novel from the Private Eye Writers of America).
Like the books, the show's appeal will be its gritty, urban location and the vibrant, often unpredictable characters who inhabit this world – highlighted by Gunner himself. The nature of the cases that Gunner solves will be not only be imbued with the fabric of this world but will also be tinged with the hot-button social and political topics of the day. Every episode will be an engrossing, stylistic window into an inner-city landscape at a particularly combustible time period in its history.
VOLK
A One-Hour Dramatic Television Series
Based on the Volk novels by Brent Ghelfi
A brutal killer maimed in Russia's war against Chechnya, Alekei "Volk" Volkovoy leads two lives—one as a powerful gangster with a hand in virtually all underworld rackets, the other as a covert military operative. When Volk gets the chance to steal a previously unknown Da Vinci painting, Leda and the Swan, which has been concealed beneath another painting in a St. Petersburg museum, Volk enlists the aid of Valya, a beautiful assassin, in plotting the theft. After an ostensible ally sabotages the operation, Volk seeks vengeance. The twists and turns accumulate at an almost dizzying pace, building to a satisfactory resolution.
REALM
A One-Hour Dramatic Television Series
Written by George Strayton
Based on The Realm and Legendlore graphic novels published by Caliber Comics
When a nuclear blast annihilates Los Angeles, a group of strangers wake up in a bizarre and dangerous fantasy world. Despite their suspicion of each other, they must work together to unravel the mystery of what this place is and who or what brought them here to find a way back home…if there’s still a home left to go to. THE REALM follows a group of seemingly unconnected people trying to survive in a deadly fantasy world. Over the course of the series, they begin to discover the personal connections they have to each other as well as a larger secret they all share. The show features all the mythological creatures and magic found in the best genre shows, but it revolves around deeper, underlying mysteries involving the characters’ personal histories and relationships as well as the presence of an advanced technology hidden within the fabric of what seems like a Game of Thrones world. While each discovery will prompt yet more secrets, the characters will have touncover the truth behind everything if they want to get back home.
GOLDBERG VARIATIONS
Director:: Matthew Mishory
Written by: Matthew Mishory and Golan Friedman
Genre: Feature Film - Drama
The Goldberg brothers are estranged. Matthew Goldberg is a former child prodigy pianist whose performance career, marriage, and financial situation have catastrophically deteriorated. As the story opens, he suffers an on-stage nervous breakdown. Simon Goldberg is a long-suffering academic who has scored an unexpected hit when his Kabbalah self-help book becomes a bestseller. Reinventing himself as a self-styled spiritualist, Simon has left Manhattan and bought a winery in the north of Israel. Desperately needing to borrow money from the Goldberg family trust (which Simon controls), Matthew reluctantly joins his brother on the winery. There, in the remote splendor of wine country, the two brothers must confront both their long-simmering animosity as well as their mutual attraction to Einav — the viticulturist who happens to be Simon's new girlfriend. A story of two brothers, Goldberg Variations is also a film about wine-making, classical music, and the mysteries of Jewish mysticism.
ISRAEL:
A CONCISE HISTORY OF A NATION REBORN
Director: Matthew Mishory
Genre: Docuseries
Winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award, A Concise History of a Nation Reborn is described as “the first comprehensive yet accessible history of the state of Israel from its inception to present day.” In the book, Gordis relays the drama of the Jewish people’s story and the creation of the state, illustrating how Israel became a cultural, economic and military powerhouse—but also explains where Israel made grave mistakes.
We will also film additional material for the series’ final episode to cover the period since the book’s publication, including: the Abraham Accords; shifting alliances in the Middle East; Israel’s new and highly-symbolic diverse governing coalition; and the ascendence of the Israeli green economy.
THE LAST ORANGE GROVE:
THE BATTLE TO SAVE BOTHWELL RANCH
Director: Matthew Mishory
Genre: Documentary
Bothwell Ranch is a 14 acre orange grove nestled in the foothills of L.A.'s San Fernando Valley - once one of the greatest agricultural producers in the nation. With the advent of the Los Angeles aqueduct, the Valley changed from farmland to suburbia. Prior to this change, Lindley Bothwell purchased a Valencia orange grove in the current Woodland Hills neighborhood. The Bothwell Ranch has produced continuously from 1929 to the present day.
Using the Bothwell Ranch as a lens, this movie will explore L.A.'s rich agricultural history and the civic pressures to transform the San Fernando Valley from fertile farmland to suburban sprawl. We will also highlight the mission of The Bothwell Ranch Foundation to preserve this unique and historical green space for future generations to enjoy.
MAMA BLACK WIDOW
Director: TBD
Screenwriter: Will De Los Santos
Genre: Feature Film - Drama
Mama Black Widow tells the story of Otis Tilson, a comely and tragic homosexual queen adrift with his brothers and sisters in the dark, labyrinthine world of pimping, tricking, violence, and petty crime. Written in the jagged, vivid, and always authentic language of the homosexual underworld and the black ghetto, Mama Black Widow is a tour of a predatory urban hell. This is Iceberg Slim's profound and disturbing masterpiece, a howl of despair from the tortured margins of urban America.
MUSIC FOR TORCHING
Director: TBD
Screenwriter: Buck Henry
Genre: Feature Film - Drama
As A.M. Homes's incendiary novel unfolds, the Kodacolor hues of the good life become nearly hallucinogenic. Laying bare the foundations of a marriage, flash frozen in the anxious entropy of a suburban subdivision, Paul and Elaine spin the quit terrors of family life into a fantastical frenzy that careens out of control. From a strange and hilarious encounter with a Stepford Wife neighbor to an ill-conceived plan for a tattoo, to a sexy cop who shows up at all the wrong moments, to a housecleaning team in space suits, a mistress calling on a cell phone, and a hostage situation at a school, A.M. Homes creates characters so outrageously flawed and deeply human that they are entirely believable.
