Île de France Film Commission and the Franco-American Cultural Foundation have announced the participants for this year’s Autumn Stories, a scheme dedicated to American screenwriters.
Janet Dulin Jones, Kasi Lemmons, Jeremy Leven and Frank Pierson have been selected to take part in the programme, which is devoted to projects set in the French capital seen through American eyes. The quartet are members of the Writers Guild of America and were picked by a jury of WGA associates.
Their planned scripts include an adaptation of Henry James’s The Ambassadors by Dulin Jones, whose many screenplays for US studios include the Emmy-nominated What If God Were The Sun?.
The writers will spend six weeks in France – five at Royaumont Abbey and one in Paris meeting producers, screenwriters and actors. The $87.3m (€60m) scheme, which is funded by two fianciers, runs from today (October 1) to November 12.
Lemmons is working on Strangers In Paris, a love-story on the banks of the Seine. Her multi-award winning directorial debut Eve’s Bayou was co-produced by Samuel L. Jackson. Meanwhile, Levin, who directed Don Juan with Marlon Brando and Johnny Depp, is developing Girl On A Bicycle, about a man’s life-changing meeting with a girl.
Pierson, already an Oscar-winning screenwriter for Dog Day Afternoon, Ratman of Paris centres on a war veteran busking on the Champs-Elysées.
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