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Vivaldi
I started writing about the film industry several
years ago when I was working as a journalist in New York
and Los Angeles. I wrote several screenplays that were
commercially viable but not the story I wanted to
tell, the story about Four Seasons composer, Antonio
Vivaldi and the orphans of Venice. Not long after
moving to Los Angeles, I was interviewing a 'player'
who was reputed to be the number one pitch man in
Holllywood. He was apparently very good at pitching
ideas to studios and getting deals for writers who
don't have the access he has. I was doing a story on
him for one of the publications I was writing for when
I ran about a dozen of my own film ideas by him. After
I was finished he said 'You have some real good ideas
there but forget the one about Vivaldi. No one is
going to be interested in making a film about an
asthmatic 17th century Baroque composer.' Predictably,
this is the idea that is about to become a major
motion picture. After the stellar cast read my
'Vivaldi' script, most of them attached to the
project. The producer, Boris Damast, referred to the
script as 'a gift' and co-producer Michel Shane who
produced 'Catch Me If You Can' for Steven Spielberg
referred to it as a 'terrific script that attracted a
great cast.' This cast includes
Joseph Fiennes as Vivaldi,
Alfred Molina,
Malcolm McDowell,
Jacqueline Bisset,
Gerard
Depardieu,
Elle Fanning,
Carice van Houten,
Neve Campbell, and
others.
I began gestating the story which became the basis of
my 'Vivaldi' screenplay over 20 years ago. Classical
music provided clarity, meaning, beauty and harmony early in my
life, all of which were absent before I started
listening to Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Schubert,
Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi et al. They imposed a certain
structure on the universe for me. Everything else was
chaos. But there was something in the music of the
Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods that I related
to instantly in terms of harmony, beauty and an
inherent balancing of things. This music was something
which seemed informed and created by people who knew
something about the eternal verities of existence and
the quotidian struggles of life across generations and
centuries. It was, in other words, reliable. For
someone without any reliable or trustworthy role
models, it was exactly what I needed as an adolescent
and has influenced and sustained me throughout my
life. I started reading about the lives
of the composers I loved and always considered the
story of Antonio Vivaldi's life an incredibly
inspiring one: asthmatic, dorky-looking priest enters
the ministry in order to play and compose music; lousy
priest-great composer and musician; subsequently
employed as musical mentor and spiritual guide to the
orphaned daughters of Venice's courtesans (there were
about 12,000 prostitutes working Venice during
Vivaldi's time, between the late 17th and early-to-mid
18th century). Some of the most
beautiful music of the Baroque era came out of this
symbiosis between the emotionally, physically scarred
orphan girls at the Ospedale della Pieta ("Hospital of
Pity") in Venice and their hyper-sensitive,
extraordinarily gifted composer priest. I knew I would
write something about Antonio some day. It turned out
to be a screenplay after I transitioned from
journalism to film. I was also aware all along that
the story has an incredibly visual canvas in Venice,
the pageantry of the 18th century Baroque, Vivaldi and
his girls and the concert performances.
I wrote a synopsis of the story and
showed it to colleagues such as writer-director Billy
Ray (Shattered Glass). He and several other people I
consulted provided mostly positive feedback. The only
caveat was that the story is obviously a period piece
which is the hardest genre to sell, particularly for a
first-time screenwriter. Nevertheless, the story is so
powerful, the music so beautiful that, being as
intrepid and counter-phobic as I am, I decided to
write the script and see if there were any takers.
The first draft took about a year to
complete although I had been making notes and thinking
about the structure much longer than that. I knew a
lot about Vivaldi's history and the history of the
epoch which expedited things. I also consulted several
reliable texts germane to the topic during the initial
writing and research period. Most of the
main characters created themselves and started
speaking with their own voices once I got a momentum
going. This entailed getting up at three or four in
the morning many, many nights when I was stuck and
considered throwing in the towel when I didn't know
where to go with the script. Something happens when I
get up early enough to beat my neurosis to the day.
Before the internal noise starts chattering. When I
was really stuck I'd hear this voice in my troubled
sleep say, "Hey, get up. I got somethin' for ya's." (I
think the voice is from Brooklyn.) As soon as I got to
my desk, the right characters gradually started
appearing, saying what they wanted to say. One of the
most fortuitous things that happened during this
period was my meeting American composer James Grant
(http://www.jamesgrantmusic.com/index.htm).I
was leasing a condo in my native downtown Toronto at
the time. A concierge I used to rap with occasionally
told me I should meet a classical composer from the
States who was using one of the condo suites in our
building as a studio. We set something up and in
addition to forging a very close friendship and
professional alliance, Jim became the unofficial music
director on the project. With a Doctor of Musical Arts
(DMA) in Composition from Cornell, Jim has been an
invaluable source of information about the era and the
composer, verifying most of what I had already written
and had planned to incorporate into the script and he
remains an invaluable consultant. I
contacted a few journalism colleagues and asked how
they would suggest marketing the script once it was
completed. I had a literary agent in Beverly Hills but
I was not represented by anyone who was plugged into
the industry in any significant way. Dan Calvisi
(www.actfourscreenplays.com), another scr(i)pt writer
and top-notch script consultant, gave me the name of
someone he knew at Miramax, Hannah Minghella. I called
her and pitched the story to her over the phone, and
she asked to see the synopsis. She loved the synopsis
and asked to see the script.
I called Miramax back to send the script to Hannah. By
that time, however, Disney was preparing to divest
itself of the brothers Bob and Harvey and everything
had been put on hold. I sent the script out to be read
by a few other directors, producers and the other
usual suspects. The feedback all around was
encouraging. I knew I had a marketable screenplay on
my hands. It was just a matter of getting it into the
right hands. I started sending Vivaldi
out to everyone who wanted to see it and more than a
few people who didn't. I had a number of studios and
readers taking a look when I was referred to Mechaniks
by my former sister-in-law, Debbi. I pitched the story
to Andrea Kikot, partner and executive producer at
Mechaniks. She loved it and had the President of
Mechaniks, Boris Damast, read it. Boris, an Australian
native and former senior creative head at some major
ad agencies, had been waiting for the right project
for years that he and his Euro producers would
consider commercially viable and appropriate for the
European market. "After reading the first 30 pages I
knew we had something here," Damast recalled. "It is
both a great visual experience and a moving personal
story. A film I dearly want to make and our European
co-production partners pounced on this
one."I was very impressed by the
distinction Boris made between my screenplay and a lot
of what gets circulated around town. Several scripts I
wrote before Vivaldi were engaging stories, well
structured, good dialogue, etc. But something has to
happen when you read a screenplay that tells you
instantly that you are reading a viable blueprint for
a motion picture, not just 120 pages of action, drama,
plot, dialogue, etc. As Boris put it, "Most scripts
are scripts. Jeffrey's script is a film."
I had to write about eight screenplays
before I knew what the difference was. Everyone who
read my other work said something like "I get it."
Everyone who read Vivaldi, particularly seasoned
industry professionals, said "I see it." After the
Europeans gave their ascent and expressed serious
interest in co-producing the film, I signed an
option-purchase agreement with Mechaniks; a six-month
option, renewable for another six months, one of which
has already expired. Not long after the
contract was signed, we found out that Ron Howard's
Imagine Entertainment was also working on a Vivaldi
project. A number of people in and out of the industry
thought this was beyond coincidence. From the
information that surfaced, the inception of my project
had predated theirs by several years. Despite that and
maybe partially because of it, Boris, Andrea and I
were even more determined to put our energy into
making our project as powerful, entertaining and
successful as possible. We were thrilled
when Variety picked up the story and put it on their
front page June 24. As they reported it, there would
be two Vivaldi projects in the works in 2005/06, both
trying to premiere first. We weren't discouraged by
the fact that we have competition. We weren't trying
to create a Vivaldi monopoly, and additional buzz is
always good in this business. Everything is on
schedule. Industry insiders, the media and the public
are bullish on the project and the projected start
date for principle photography remains late
winter/early spring 2008.
http://www.playbillarts.com/news/article/2341.html
http://www.timeout.com/film/news/1685/vivaldi-role-for-fiennes.html
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117958269.html?categoryid=13&cs
http://www.totalfilm.com/movie_news/joseph_fiennes_plays_vivaldi
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