Upcoming Projects

THE SEARCH FOR MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER

“My name’s Michael Rockefeller. Please help me!”

Michael Rockefeller, as reported by John Donahue to Milt Machlin, 1968

On November 11, 1961 Michael Rockefeller, anthropologist Rene Wassing, and two native boys left on a voyage down the coast of New Guinea from Agats to the cannibal villages of the Asmat interior, in a heavily laden trading canoe. Several miles off shore, heavy seas swamped their top-heavy craft, off the mouth of the Eilanden River. 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, the best-selling book by journalist and Argosy magazine 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.

Fortunately for us, Machlin took a cinematographer on his expedition, along with two 16mm cameras and several rolls of film. For unknown reasons, this color 16mm footage has lain dormant for forty years, gathering dust in a vault in New England, until it was unearthed in 2008 by film-maker Fraser Heston, while researching a screenplay on Milt Machlin.

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

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!"

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.