| Film Offerings MAJOR MARKETS With Screenplay: All the properties offered by this agency are of the highest literary quality and have been fully edited under our supervision. These proposals come with screenplay in Final Draft format and supporting all the usual production-assistance summaries. Producers, Commissioning Representatives, or Agencies interested in any of these properties are cordially invited to contact senior-partner@aaraulit.com. Please put "Producer Inquiry" in the subject line of the e-mail. There are further major market novels with proposals (sans screenplays) available below. Some other novels on the Properties for Publishers pages are also suitable and have film proposals or screenplays under development. © Aarau Literary Agency 2010 Click on the titles below for details (all with screenplays) Deadly Passage The Forgotten Shooting The Mailbox MAJOR MARKET NOVELS With Proposal: (not including screenplays) Click here to return to the top |
| Deadly Passage SWGW Reg. 1425805 Tagline There isn’t one. This is a fresh and unique plotline. Others will tag to this! Instead of the predictable and hackneyed: ‘Virus in a vial, for God’s sake don’t drop it!’— Loglines An Islamic terrorist couple volunteer and are infected with a deadly bioengineered virus with the intention of reaching Miami by sea in a chartered sailboat ‘to infect and kill thousands’. The protagonist is a family man caught up in extraordinary events trying to get them all home. Starline Tom Hanks as Andy Reiss (age 48, sailboat captain, senior physician) Genre Deadly Passage is a multi-layered, high-seas, adventure-thriller novel of bioterrorism in a post 9/11 world by an experienced American yachtsman and senior physician. This offering includes the author’s co-written screenplay. The film operates on several levels not commonly encountered in a high-octane thriller, including profound personal insights into the terrorists, their backgrounds, rationale, and subtle conflicts within the communities from which they have been drawn that ultimately condition their decisions and actions. The responses of US governmental agencies mirror these diverse perspectives. Capsule Synopsis An Iraqi research virologist, embittered by his son’s death at the hands of the American forces, bioengineers a deadly virus. He claims jihad, but in truth is seeking personal revenge. He offers the virus to Al-Qaida operatives who hatch a plot. Two terrorists will infect themselves and thus become the vectors carrying the virus to Miami. The couple travel to Cuba where they obtain and ingest the virus shipped in via the Syrian diplomatic pouch. When the Cuban government discovers the plot they try to stop it, fearing reprisal from the United States. A physician and his registered-nurse wife with their barely teenage daughter, head home on their sailboat Prophecy after five years at sea touring the world. When Prophecy comes upon a sailboat adrift, they find a man and a woman seriously ill. After bringing them aboard, they discover that they have rescued the two Islamic terrorists who are near to death from dehydration and the early effects of the viral infection. Soon the disease is full-blown, sealing the fates of the terrorists and all those they encounter. Prophecy’s crew must deal with the unwanted guests, their disease, the Cuban Navy, an approaching hurricane, and the U.S. Coast Guard turning them away from safety, operating under the influence of conflicting political and operational motivations in the Department of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard and the Oval Office. The shocking and unexpected denouements leave us twisting in uncertain winds reminiscent of On the Beach. 70,000 word novel (110-minute screenplay). A Robust Scene-based Synopsis completes the Proposal Film rights to novel and Screenplay Click here to return to the top |
| The Forgotten SWGW Reg. 1429942 Tagline Lawrence of Arabia wakes up in the Alamo Logline In a forgotten chapter of World War II history, an engineering company of Palestinian Jews is ordered to a suicide defense of the Mechili pass against the massed forces of Rommel in a replay 2500 years later of 300 Spartans against the Persians at Thermopylae. Genre Military Action Docudrama 100% authentic and fully documentable. Starlines Major Felix Liebman: Tom Hanks Sergeant Boaz: John Malkovich Capsule Synopsis The North Africa (1942): what the cynical British Command refers to behind their back as a “suicide force” of 500 Jews is ordered by General Auchinleck to defend the Mechili pass to protect the British Eighth Army’s flank against the massed forces of General Rommel. They held out for 28 days leaving less than 50 out of 500 survivors until relieved on their last legs by the Free French. A renowned Canadian war correspondent robustly documented it as “The Forgotten Battle of WW2”. This and other references are used. The play begins years later with Ari, one of the survivors, being directed to the author of this screenplay (and novel) when an undergraduate, relating the blow-by-blow history in the hope that the truth might someday be told (this is also factual). This morphs into an exciting and detailed docudrama of the month-long battle for survival of the company and the Eighth Army retreating behind them. An earlier defeat suffered by the British nearby and the retreat that this stalwart defense successfully covered may be the reasons why this major episode of the war was suppressed in the British records. Fortunately, there are independent French sources and witnesses. This is a heroic story whose time has come to be told by the best in the business. A Robust Scene-based Synopsis completes the Proposal Film rights to novel and Screenplay Click here to return to the top |
| Shooting the Mailbox SWGW Reg. 1463476 Tagline Huck Finn meets Jack Kerouac. Logline Three 16 year-old farm boys shoot up a mailbox, and naively fearing the authorities, run away from their upstate New York homes in a decrepit Ford for the 2500 mile run on Highway 66 to Southern California—turbulently coming of age in mid-century America. Bottom-line They believed they were America’s most wanted—then came to wish they were. Genre True adventure memoir for family and general audiences: action Docudrama fully documented in the book. Capsule Synopsis The runaways spend a harrowing week on the road to arrive exhausted, near broke, but buoyantly optimistic, in Burbank, California. Then reality sets in: what do they do for a place to live, schooling, underage jobs, and can they achieve the autonomy they need as juveniles to survive on their own? The authorities have other ideas and their problems with the police, school, girls, and their legal status have just begun. The saga evokes a long-gone era when the world was new, the skies were clear, and headstrong boys could survive on their own when surrounded by the essential goodness of a people who still maintained the ethos of a Free West to which young men had gone for more than a century in their search for adventure and a new life. Truth was later confirmed stranger than fiction yet again, for the memoir’s author was soon drawn to another frontier—that of space beyond earth itself, in a noteworthy lifelong career at CalTech JPL/NASA. And of course, the trio, all successful in their walks of life, just had to make the run again 50 years later, in youthful vigor but on superhighways this time. Film rights to book and Screenplay Click here to return to the top |
| MAJOR MARKET NOVELS With Proposal:
The following properties are presented as novels offering film rights with a full Proposal including Robust Scene-based Synopses of 5–15 pages. All Agency materials are block-registered in their entirety with the SWGW. The Piano Room This is a UK police procedural thriller by a police Detective Chief Inspector on active duty. The serial killers are capturing men and women to re-enact historical events in true snuff videos: Joan of Arc, Anne Boleyn and others. Dastra is the police investigator married to Lucy, a Californian university student who happened on the first bodies during a tree-hugging protest. Dastra is framed, falsely accused, convicted, jailed, and released on appeal but is still suspected by another senior officer with a vendetta against him. The denouement is a race by all back to the Piano Room to prevent Lucy from becoming the next victim during the final hours of her pregnancy. The killer has begun one last video…a reenactment of the Charles Manson murders. 110,000 words. Film proposal available. To be published in the summer of 2012 by Champagne Books. Producer sought for this strong property. The Collineau Covenant The film explodes with a shattering act of terrorism against the Vatican. Rome’s Carabinieri anti-terror chief faces an enigmatic mix of the criminal underworld and ostensibly legitimate groups driven by ruthless greed, historical feuds and delusions of heavenly glory. His adversaries are immensely wealthy and widely influential. Are some high in the Church, or those he has long trusted, among them? The Collineau Covenant, with its origins dating back to the 14th century, is the Holy Grail inspiring the collaborators. Can the billionaire American fundamentalist, prepared to risk everything he possesses, follow its precepts and take control of the New Catholic Church—its doctrines and its riches—like Richelieu succeeded in doing centuries before him? 120,000 words. Film proposal available, screenplay in process. Whatever the Impulse This is a psychological thriller set in the 80s rock music world. Night Shannien is 19 years old before he begins to realize that his surrogate father has been using him as slave labor in his bar-restaurant on the mid-Oregon coast. Never sent to school and trusting in his father’s motives, he is taught to act as if he were deaf and communicate by sign language. As Night finally yields to the inevitable primal human passions, he sets off a chain of events that expose the truth about his bizarre existence. His only way out is as a fugitive—a naïve adult-child in an alien world that everyone save himself understands. Only Night can substitute for the terminally ill twin brother he discovers (long hidden from him) and save the rising rock group’s major tour. Night’s roles are complicated by his past, his own reluctance to be “used” once again, the temptations of forbidden sex at every turn—and his ‘father’ stalking him across the continent. With an almost soulless lack of inhibition and nothing to guide him but instinct and resentment, Night tests the limits between right and wrong, falling back on one easy guideline: Whatever the Impulse. 130,000 words. Film proposal available. A Long Night of Chaos This expertly-informed and sweeping novel features fictionalized pen portraits of such historical figures as Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbian gangster-warlord, Arkan, in the context of an imaginary Soviet republic. Those familiar with the actual history will see the parallels. Those who aren’t will enjoy a powerful, insightful and epic novel. This is a roman à clef in 4 parts: the descent of a fictional ‘Yugoslavia’ into civil war. The principal character is an Olympic champion and national hero who is squeezed in all directions by the political forces and personalities. In the end he trumps them all and saves his country from civil war. The plot is held together by a skein of romances between the leading characters—both illicit and righteously charming. It can be fairly read as a romantic novel in the tradition of a 19th century Russian novelist but executed in a modern, gripping thriller genre. 150,000 words. A mini-series film proposal is available. Queensbury Rules of Terror This is a dynamic and informative political thriller with unusual insights into the characters. Jamie is intelligent, highly educated, middle-class, white and British. He is also a terrorist. He takes Anna into hiding as a hostage. As their relationship develops, both characters try to reconcile their personal feelings for one another with the stark facts of their situation—Jamie’s need to remain distant enough to keep himself and his co-conspirators safe and Anna’s feelings of revulsion with Jamie’s past and her wavering need for revenge. When the police track them down, Anna has a plan to keep them together: they can enter the murky world between intelligence agencies and private wealth, and possibly protect their industrialist sponsor by reforming his business, seeking to appease Jamie’s terrorist movement by working towards its arguably legitimate humanitarian goals—but in doing so they create new enemies who may prove more deadly even than the terrorists…and some may be in their own camp. A film proposal is available. The Men Without Heads This is a witty, humorous, young adult thriller with oodles of modern popular jazz set in Zurich. If you’re a man who’s under thirty or his girl (or remember when you were), then you’ll soar with Paul Todd. He has the talent to make it in rock and jazz, the charisma to attract Europe’s loveliest women and a naiveté profound enough to get him trapped between the jaws of the mafia and police. He’s made the improbable escape from grey old England that we all dream of, busking his way through one sunlit summer in Zurich. We are introduced as insiders to the secret venues of the modern troubadours, and into the hidden recesses of a man’s spirit as he lives through the age-old conflicts between love and success. It’s a funky, exciting, insightful and often hilarious account of the bohemian lifestyles and people south of the English Channel. 70,000 words. A film proposal is under development and out shortly. Click here to return to the top |
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