Upcoming Projects

DEMILLE DIRECTS

The true story of how three men, a Polish glover named Samuel Goldfish, New York lawyer Jessie Lasky, and a failing Broadway director named Cecil B. DeMille came to a small dusty farm town outside Los Angeles to evade the thugs of the Edison Trust and make the first feature length motion picture - THE SQUAW MAN - and invented "Hollywood" in the process.

This charming, intelligent and funny screenplay is written by Steve Paolozzi. Alex Butler will produce and Fraser C. Heston, who began his career working for C.B. DeMille as the Baby Moses in the 1955 TEN COMMANDMENTS, directs. "I took to this script the moment I picked it up, and fell in love with it in the first ten pages," says Fraser. "As it happens, I may be the last actor to have ever been directed by C.B. Demille, so I guess it's only fitting that I direct this loving homage to the visionary men who invented Hollywood movies as we know them."

MOSES - Animated Feature

I am a man of many lifetimes. Born a slave. Raised a prince. Criminal. Wanderer. Shepherd. Prophet. Servant of God. In the end, all any man truly amounts to, all that he has, are the stories of his life. I am Moses. This is my story.

So begins MOSES, the story of a prophet sacred to three religions, and perhaps the greatest story of all time.

As a follow-up to this year's successful release of the Agamemnon Films - Good Times Entertainment production of the animated BEN HUR, it was only natural for Agamemnon to develop an animated version of this Biblical classic. The script, by veteran screenwriter Jerome Gary (who penned the BEN HUR script) and Ben Engel is a fresh look at the life of Moses, who narrates his own story. Drawing primarily on references from the Five Books of Moses in both the King James, New Standard and Hebrew Bibles, the script has many scenes which have not been seen before on film, making it both fresh and familiar at the same time.

Like BEN HUR, and the highly successful Agamemnon docu-drama THE BIBLE, which has sold over five million copies on DVD and video-cassette, this production is designed to appeal to families, children and adults alike, across a broad spectrum of demographics, religions, and cultures the world over.

2002, animated feature, Good Times Entertainment/Agamemnon Films

The project, currently in production, is directed by Tundra Production’s William R. Kowalchuk, who is also producing the film with Agamemnon’s John Stronach. Fraser C. Heston will serve as Executive Producer for Agamemnon and Seth Willenson as Executive Producer for Goodtimes. The screenplay was written by veteran screenwriter Jerome Gary, adapted from the novel by Lew Wallace.

The feature-length animated film is being developed by Tundra in classic 2-D animation, with 3-D backgrounds, combining the best of traditional animation techniques with new technology and state of the art 3D animation techniques, including historically accurate CGI recreations of famous settings such as ancient Jerusalem and a complete Roman galley.
Read Press Release here

THE SEARCH FOR MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER

On November 11, 1961, the 23-year-old son of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller led a small expedition along the treacherous cannibal coast of New Guinea, with anthropologist RENE WASSING. Heavy seas swamped their trading canoe in the Arafura Sea. After a night adrift clinging to the wreckage, Rockefeller set out to swim for the distant shore, leaving Wassing with the fateful words: "I think I can make it…"

He was never seen again.

The disappearance of Michael Rockefeller is one of the enduring unsolved mysteries of the 20th Century. The Search For Michael Rockefeller, by best-selling author, journalist and Argosy editor Milt Machlin, tells the true story of the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller in the jungles of New Guinea in 1961, and Machlin's epic search for him seven years later, when an Aussie smuggler walked into his office claiming to have seen Rockefeller alive, "not ten weeks ago" in the Trobriand Islands. "If by any stretch of the imagination, said Milt, "Rockefeller could have survived, somewhere in the jungles of New Guinea, then he would have to be found. And I was determined to be the one to find him."

Despite a massive air-sea search, and international furor, no trace of Rockefeller was ever found. The truth about his fate remains a mystery to this day, though Machlin puts forward several gruesome and astonishing possibilities. THE SEARCH FOR MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER is a gripping Roshomon-like tale of one of the most unsettling vanishings ever to have engaged the nation. Writers Fraser Heston and Alex Butler, who most recently collaborated on a contemporary thriller based on Bram Stoker's Gothic horror story JEWEL OF SEVEN STARS for Castle Rock Entertainment, will join forces again on the adaptation.

Currently in development at Agamemnon.

LOT 249

A horror-thriller set in contemporary Oxford, based on the short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the script is written by Joel Newman. This updating of a classic is an edgy, macabre and witty take on what may be the first "mummy" story, penned by the prolific Conan Doyle at the end of the 19th Century. "This story is both genuinely terrifying and a romp from start to finish," says screenwriter Joel Newman, who adapted the short story for the screen. "It grabs you from the very first page and never lets you go."

Director Fraser Heston, who also directed the Sherlock Holmes tale CRUCIFER OF BLOOD for TNT, as well as Stephen King's NEEDFUL THINGS for Castle Rock entertainment, agrees. "Conan Doyle is a timeless writer of the macabre. Authors like Doyle and Poe literally invented the genre. Updating his classic for contemporary audiences will be a pleasure. I can't wait to get my hooks into it!"

THE HANGED MAN

This original genre screenplay by Joel Newman is a tale of sex and death that has its origins in ancient Druidic rights of human sacrifice, and owes its film heritage to classics like THE WICKER MAN, DON'T LOOK NOW, and CHILDREN OF THE CORN.

A lone traveler breaks down on a deserted stretch of highway, and finds himself invited to stay with a beautiful lonely widow while his Porsche is being repaired. Unable to leave this remote valley, he is drawn inexorably into a web of seduction, desire, fear and death.

"That this sort of thing could still be going on, in the 21st Century, is a chilling notion," says director Fraser Heston. "Joel's dark, sexy and disturbing script makes it not only plausible, but utterly compelling. This is irresistible story-telling."

LAWS OF NATURE

This allegorical, post-apocaplyptic thriller currently being scripted by Vancouver writer Michael Thoma is set only fifty years in the future, but it's a world gripped in a global climate change which has precipitated not the melting of the polar ice caps, but a virtual ice age. And in the far North, now a world of perpetual snow, bitter cold and advancing glaciers, hopeless men labor in "gulags", indentured servants legally bound in slavery to pump the last precious drops of oil from dwindling reserves. The shocking truth is, when the oil runs out, and the men will lose not only their livelihood but their lives, for they are utterly dependant upon their own oil for heat and power in this near-alien environment. Mutiny is in the air.

Into this harsh and hostile realm a "flying court" complete with judge, lawyers and executioner, descends upon these desperate men to restore order. With new emergency powers granted by the provisional government, the Judge meets out draconian sentences of harsh corporal punishment and death. His mission is to keep the oil flowing, at all costs.

When their plane crashes in a storm, the fate of these men and women rests with one man, reckless hard-ass Joshua, who has been condemned by these same people to die by flogging for a murder he did not commit.

"Michael's story is completely original, and frighteningly credible," says producer Alex Butler, "He has envisioned a world which is the logical conclusion to our own. It's clearly where we're headed in fifty or a hundred years, where frontier-style justice is meted out by "hanging" judges with extraordinary emergency powers. Like other futuristic genre thrillers, such as Danny Boyle's 28 DAYS LATER, I find this sort of story both thought-provoking and highly entertaining."

Currently in development at Agamemnon.

VOYAGE FOR MADMEN

On April 22, 1969 -- three months before Neil Armstrong's walk on the Moon -- the world watched as a small sailboat came ashore at Falmouth, England, completing a voyage of astonishing courage and endurance that would forever alter our ongoing adventure with the sea. Ten months earlier, nine very different men had set off in small and ill-equipped boats, determined to do the impossible: sail around the world alone and without stopping, to win the race dubbed the Golden Globe. Only one of the nine would cross the finish line -- to fame, wealth, and glory. For the others, the rewards would be despair, madness, and death.
The men were inspired by Sir Francis Chichester, who had become a national hero in Britain for stopping only once (in Australia) while sailing alone around the world. Suddenly what had seemed impossible-to circumnavigate the world alone and nonstop -- now appeared within reach. For nine driven men -- among them Robin Knox-Johnston, a young Merchant Marine captain; Bernard Moitessier, a French mystic; Donald Crowhurst, a brilliant, troubled electrical engineer; and Chay Blyth, an Army sergeant who had rowed across the Atlantic in 1966 but did not know how to saila gauntlet had been thrown down, a challenge they found themselves overwhelmingly and inexplicably compelled to accept.