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Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Germany's Komplizen Boards Michelangelo Antonioni Swan Song ‘Technically Sweet' in Co-Production with ‘Senna's Gullane and Italy's Vivo Film (EXCLUSIVE)
Germany's Komplizen has boarded 'Technically Sweet,' a drama based on the last screenplay by the late and legendary Michelangelo Antonioni ('Blowup'), which Brazil's Gullane Filmes ('Senna') and Italy's Vivo Film ('Le Quattro Volte') have been developing. 'We are committed to making a significant German contribution to the project,' said Komplizen's Jonas Dornbach, Janine Jackowski and Maren Ade, who expressed their delight at joining the project. More from Variety Jeremy Irons, Vanessa Redgrave and Michael York Join Animated Sci-Fi Adventure 'The Crystal Planet,' Sold by Sola Media (EXCLUSIVE) Cannes' Marché du Film Announces Brazil Country of Honor Program With Presence of Minister of Culture, Focus on Co-Production and Funding Mubi Signs Major Three-Year Co-Production, Financing and Distribution Pact With Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Mieli's Our Films (EXCLUSIVE) The film is to be directed by Brazil's André Ristum, the son of Antonioni's A.D. Jirges Ristum, who died before he could take over the project that the maestro had entrusted to him. Antonioni's widow, Enrica Antonioni, is an associate producer. 'Technically Sweet' follows a man in his forties whose sudden trip to Sardinia compels him to reevaluate his life. He navigates tense real estate dealings, grows entangled with a girl he can't quite understand and forges a deep connection with a boy who draws him in. As unexpected events unfold, he slips further from the path he once followed. After a personal setback, he heads into the Amazon, where confronting the forces of nature alters the course of his life. 'The idea is to shoot it in Sardinia and Brazil's Amazon,' Fabiano Gullane told Variety while in Madrid with his brother Caio Gullane for the Premios Platino awards event, adding that the company aims to make three movies and three series a year. 'Brazil has a mature audiovisual industry and it is now bolstered by the activity of the streamers,' he said, reveling in the fact that Brazil is the Country of Honor at this year's Cannes Marché du Film. Among Guallane's upcoming projects is the sequel to its animated musical feature 'Noah's Ark,' a co-production with India's Symbiosys Entertainment ('Ant Man,' 'Wolverine') and Walter Salles' Videofilmes (behind Oscar-winning 'I'm Still Here'). Edward Noeltner's LA-based CMG is an associate producer and has sold 'Noah's Ark' to 72 countries. 'This is the biggest animation project to come out of Brazil,' the Gullanes declared. In the sequel, the ark is now on dry land and the stowaway rats, Vini and Tito alongside female rat Nina, visit the other animals who have disembarked. They will perform songs by Vinícius de Moraes that were not used in the first film. Also in development is 'New Cancun' with Sandra Kogut 'Campo Grande') attached to direct and Sandra Casé ('The Second Mother') to star. The co-production with Meltem Films (France), Globo Filmes and Telecine follows 65-year-old Madá who has vowed to bury a keepsake at a river's source if her surrogate daughter Vanessa's risky pregnancy succeeds. When they arrive, the site has been overtaken by New Cancun, a smart city project led by Madá's former boss. Blocked from the river, Madá is forced to confront both a changing landscape and long-buried wounds. Currently in production is drama 'School Without Walls' by Cao Hamburger ('The Year My Parents Went on Vacation'), a co-production with Portugal's Ukbar Filmes, France's Playtime and Brazil's Globo Filmes. The drama is based on the true story of Braz Nogueira, an educator who becomes principal of a public school in Heliópolis, one of Brazil's largest slums. Faced with daily violence, disengaged teachers and government neglect, he confronts the chaos with empathy and resolve. Through an innovative pilot project, he unites students, teachers and community leaders—transforming the school and the neighborhood it serves. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
Telegraph
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alan Ayckbourn on their ‘traumatic' megaflop Jeeves
There's an anniversary looming on April 22 that neither Alan Ayckbourn nor Andrew Lloyd Webber will be rushing to celebrate. It will be 50 years since the official unveiling of 'Jeeves', the pair's disastrous attempt to fashion a rip-roaring hoot, and hit, from one of the great comic literary properties of the 20 th century: PG Wodehouse 's Jeeves books. It's often held as the biggest theatrical flop of the 1970s, and of their careers. Even though the pair would ultimately wrest victory from defeat, with a successful rewritten version By Jeeves in 1996, it was a blot on their CV. An opening night that should have met with rapturous applause and raves elicited cat-calls from the gallery and savage reviews ('Disastrous' – the Telegraph) that ensured the curtain fell on the show at Her Majesty's after a month. It was the ignominious climax to a saga that had seen a calamitous try-out in Bristol, shock sackings – including the last-minute departure of the director – and a near-mutiny by the cast. That Lloyd Webber was braced for the worst was evidenced by the fact he wasn't present as the ordeal unfolded; he retreated nearby, to dine with Ayckbourn at the old 'Petit Club Français'. The night ended with the latter attempting to rally an inconsolable David Hemmings. The baby-faced heart-throb, who had made his name in Antonioni's Blowup, literally collapsed in a heap after valiantly carrying the show as Bertie Wooster. 'Somebody said, 'I think you guys had better go and see David,' Ayckbourn, now 85, recalls, ''He's absolutely distraught. He has had the most terrible evening.' So we went along to his dressing-room. David's girlfriend was shouting into the shower. David was in there, crouching in the corner, naked, the water full on. She was saying: 'You can't stay in there, David, it isn't your fault!' And I said: 'David, it's Alan. Look, we're really sorry, mate, it's nothing to do with you. The whole show went wrong from the minute we started it.' I was dressed up for the first night and got soaking wet. I went home and watched TV.' 'It was,' he continues, when we meet in Scarborough, 'the most traumatic moment of my life.' Lloyd Webber doesn't put it in quite those terms but tells me: 'I was obviously very, very, very upset about it'. In his memoir, Unmasked, he memorably describes the show as a 'driverless juggernaut hurtling downhill'. With hindsight, the co-ordinates looked set for catastrophe from early on. But the omens, initially, were promising. Ayckbourn was the new darling of the West End, riding high with Absurd Person Singular and The Norman Conquests, while at 25 Lloyd Webber's stock was through the roof thanks to Jesus Christ Superstar, already a fixture in London. Their names helped ensure a high-calibre cast – aside from Hemmings, there was Michael Aldridge, later of Last of the Summer Wine fame, playing Jeeves and adored comic actress Betty Marsden as Aunt Dahlia. Wodehouse was so persuaded of the project's potential he gave it his blessing. But if Ayckbourn and Lloyd Webber sounded like 'a dream team', one salient fact in making sense of the debacle is that Ayckbourn's role as the book-writer was expanded at short-notice to take in lyric-writing because Lloyd Webber's other half, creatively - Tim Rice - bailed early. After unfruitful weeks of slogging on a script derived from The Code of the Woosters and songs, Rice realised, he says in his memoir, that 'All I was doing was making the master PG Wodehouse unfunny – quite an achievement'. And he had chanced on a compelling alternative: the life of Eva Peron. Alarm-bells began to ring for Ayckbourn almost as soon as he got on-board, following a merry, boozy evening with the pair on a canal boat. There was no sign of Rice at the ensuing meeting the next day, and Lloyd Webber tried to persuade Ayckbourn that writing lyrics was '' a piece of p**s.' I was thinking: 'This is surreal,' and that set the tone.' Indeed the ensuing visit to Wodehouse on Long Island in the autumn of 1974 (he died on Valentine's Day the following year) sounds surreal in the extreme. Ayckbourn's stand-out memory of this somewhat strained showcase, presented in a suitably piano-equipped house 'owned by a prominent drug dealer', is of reaching the end and the kindly 'Plum', as he was nicknamed, being swept – dismayed - past a groaning table of sandwiches he had had his eye on by his wife Ethel: 'She said: 'Come on, we're off!'' Lloyd Webber remembers Wodehouse – who had enjoyed success as a lyricist, not least contributing 'Bill' to Show Boat – saying: ''Are you sure my characters are strong enough to sustain something like this?' And of course you know that's very telling.' Telling, too, was the gargantuan size of the script that Ayckbourn delivered just before rehearsals. 'It made Gone with the Wind look like a pamphlet,' Lloyd Webber jokes. David Wood, the children's playwright, then also an actor, who was cast as Bertie's pal Bingo Little, a job that involved a terrifying-sounding bit of comic business that required him to be suspended from a chandelier, remembers his outspoken agent Peggy Ramsay (also Ayckbourn's) saying: 'she knew there was going to be a problem as soon as she heard the script landing on the doormat. She could tell it was far too long.' Lloyd Webber hadn't attempted a 'book musical' before, Ayckbourn was a musicals novice and he recruited another newcomer to the form to direct, his regular collaborator Eric Thompson (father of Emma, and well-known too on account of The Magic Roundabout). The set designer was the Polish émigré Voytek, whose vision was of a green minimalist box, into which items of furniture would be sparingly introduced. 'It was the most hideous set I've ever seen,' Lloyd Webber observes – and, as the cast discovered, it was so thickly constructed they struggled to hear the cues. There was mounting collective anxiety from early on – glances were exchanged when Thompson reduced the rehearsal period to four weeks, and also suggested the cast simply speed up their delivery to cut the running-time - but Lloyd Webber saw himself as 'too junior' to intervene. Thompson used drink as a crutch, as did Hemmings, who would start in the morning. 'There was always a bottle of Hirondelle on the table and Eric was always sending out for more,' shudders Lloyd Webber. 'I was just thinking: 'Help, help!'' By the time the show arrived at the Bristol Hippodrome for a try-out it had become preposterously unwieldy. Cast as Madeline Bassett, Gabrielle Drake – who was reeling from the recent death of her brother Nick, the singer-songwriter – remembers the technical rehearsal lasting for several days, leaving no time for a dress rehearsal. 'The first performance ran around four and three-quarter hours. When the curtain came down we were all so relieved that it had ended without a disaster, we didn't care.' Finally the penny dropped that substantial cuts were needed. Ayckbourn suggested axing Aunt Dahlia; Thompson was required to relay the news to Marsden. 'I sat beside him, and Betty came in and, 'Hello darlings… What the **** are we going to do?' Eric said, 'Well, Betty…' She said, 'Don't tell me, you've cut my ****ing part!' There was silence. Then the air turned blue and Eric went pale. Of course, it sent a shock-wave through the company. People were going: 'Well, it's you next!'' In fact it was Thompson who got the boot, five days before the London press night, the composer's pleas for the run at Her Majesty's to be abandoned having fallen on deaf ears. Ayckbourn was summoned to the (hitherto alarmingly absent) co-producer Robert Stigwood's house in north London in the dead of the night. 'He said: 'The first thing I want to do is get rid of the director.' I said: 'I don't think he's to blame.' And he said: 'He lost control of it and I want you to take over.' Of course when I got there in the morning, nobody wanted to know, and the whole cast were extremely hostile.' Ayckbourn's working relationship with Thompson (who died in 1982) never recovered. What both he and Lloyd Webber insist on, though, is that the two of them never fell out, and one surprising twist in the tale is how much solidarity arose in the cast. Even though Drake can still recite some of the more toe-curling lyrics ('Even Mr Moon's begun to snore/ Good grief, no more'), she cherishes the camaraderie: 'I dined out on it a lot', she says, with a sang-froid worthy of Wooster's unflappable valet. 'If you're going to be in a flop, best it be a huge one.' Ever one to accentuate the positives, Lloyd Webber believes that – the vindication of the nimbler 1996 incarnation aside – his own fortunes were improved, not dented, by the flop. It prompted the hand of friendship, and some top-hole advice, from the American director Hal Prince – who urged him to persevere and stay in touch. 'Neither Evita nor The Phantom of the Opera might have happened were it not for Jeeves.' Ayckbourn left nothing to chance at the 1996 try-out for By Jeeves at the Stephen Joseph in Scarborough, though. 'I got the Archbishop of York in to bless the building on press night. I said: 'I need an exorcism, please!''
