ContentFilm

ContentFilm announces that it has acquired the international sales rights to the epic family film, “Mee-Shee the Water Giant”. The film is produced by Rainer Mockert’s MBP Medien and Barry Authors’ BarryFilms in association with the Jim Henson Creature Shop and Eli Klein’s Infatrade Group Corporation. It is directed by John Henderson (familiar from a raft of television work, including such children’s programmes as “The Borrowers” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass”, but also from his 1996 feature film debut “Loch Ness”). In Barry Authors’ screenplay, a helicopter crash in a remote Canadian lake leads to Sean Cambell (played by Bruce Greenwood of “I, Robot” and “Thirteen Days”), an oil company trouble-shooter, being called in to help retrieve a unique drill head. Disappointed by yet another postponement of a Florida vacation with his father, Sean’s ten-year-old son Mac is nevertheless quickly diverted by tales of a legendary creature that supposedly lives in the lake. Mac teams up with a local Native American girl called Pawnee to search for the monster. Trekking by the lake, Mac slips and falls into the water, only to be rescued by a massive creature, the water giant. Mac locates his lair and comes face to face with the huge but frightened Mee-Shee. An unlikely friendship begins. Within days a rival oil company arrives in an attempt to steal the drill, but the villains quickly realise that the drill is not the only prize they need to take home with them. Mac must find a way to save his newfound friend, but first he must convince his father that the creature is real, and this is not as easy as he’d hoped. The London branch of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop brought Mee-Shee, the water giant of the title, to life using its unrivalled digital and animatronic technology. Through its international sales division, ContentFilm International, the Company has the rights to sell “Mee-Shee the Water Giant” in all markets outside the US. The film is in post-production and will be finished in the second quarter of 2005. Jamie Carmichael, ContentFilm International’s MD, said: ‘I showed some of the very early special effects created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop to my young son and his friends and they were bowled over. Mee-Shee is so lifelike he takes your breath away. Family films can do extremely well commercially and this high quality epic adventure has a chance to really enchant children today – and for generations to come.’ ENDS

Enquiries:

Please call Tim Allan, Portland 020 7404 5344

Notes :

1. ContentFilm plc is a London-based film production, distribution and financing company. It has operations in Los Angeles, New York and London. It was formed in March 2004 through a reverse takeover of Winchester Entertainment plc by ContentFilm, Inc., a New York-based, independent film production company. The group’s strategy is to build a fully integrated international film business, producing high quality films on disciplined budgets and developing an enhanced international sales and distribution business in the US and Europe.
2. In the UK, ContentFilm recently released the BBC Films production of “My Summer of Love”, the winner of the 2004 Michael Powell award for Best New British Feature Film at Edinburgh. Following rapturous reviews, the film has won six nominations for the British Independent Film Awards on 30 November – as Best British Independent Film, for Paddy Considine as both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor/Actress, for Natalie Press as Best Actress, for Emily Blunt as Most Promising Newcomer, for Pawel Pawlikowsky as Best Director. It also recently completed principal photography on the drama “The King,” starring Gael Garcia Bernal and William Hurt. Other ContentFilm productions include David Gordon Green’s new film, “Undertow,” starring Dermot Mulroney, Josh Lucas and Jamie Bell, released by United Artists on 28 October 2004.

   It has also acquired the international sales rights to Vertigo Films’ production of “The Business”, directed and written by Nick Love and starring Danny Dyer. The production began filming in Malaga, Spain, in late September, and covers the lives of the expatriate criminal community who in the 1980s were able to take advantage of the lack of a joint extradition treaty and shelter on Spain’s so-called Costa del Crime. It has the potential to be a sun-baked English ” Goodfellas”.

3. In 1998, twenty-two years after he began working in the film industry, Rainer Mockert founded MBP Medien, a Munich-based, private investment film fund and production company, developing, producing and co-producing English-language films. Among the titles that MBP has produced are Ray Lawrence’s “Lantana”, starring Anthony LaPaglia, which won five Independent Film and seven AFI Awards, Fred Schepsi’s “Last Orders” with Sir Michael Caine, David Hemmings and Dame Helen Mirren, and Terence Ryan’s Puckoon, from Spike Milligan’s novel of the same name.

   In all of these films Rainer Mockert served as Executive Producer.

4. A Canadian, Barry Authors has enjoyed a long career in the entertainment industry. Beginning as one half of the comedy duo, Authors and Swinson, he progressed to the field of management and agency, and in the first half of the 1970s he acted for the British pop group, Blue Mink, and for Norman Wisdom. He then tried his own hand at music and in 1976, as JJ Barrie, he released the number one hit single, No Charge.

   Moving into film was a logical conclusion. He has five working screenplays to his credit, and is working with director John Henderson on a screenplay, loosely based on his youthful experiences in the weird world of show business, “Snakes and Ladders.

5. Born in 1936 in Greenville, Mississippi, Jim Henson achieved success early with a twice-daily, five minute show broadcast on NBC’s Washington D.C. TV station, WRC-TV, in 1955. Made in collaboration with his future wife, Jane Nebel, Sam and Friends introduced many of the hallmarks that would later be insolubly linked with The Muppets, including an early version of Kermit the Frog. Jim Henson and Jane Nebel teamed up with writer and puppeteer, Jerry Juhl, in 1961 and two years later the team moved to New York where they joined up with master puppet builder, Don Sahlin, and young puppeteer, Frank Oz. In 1966, TV producer Joan Ganz Cooney began work on Sesame Street and asked Jim Henson to create its characters. Premiered in 1969, Sesame Street soon became one of the world’s leading children’s educational programmes. Jim Henson failed to find backers for his planned The Muppet Show in the US, but ATV Studios, under Lord Grade, brought the production to England in 1975. The 1980s saw Henson saw Henson extend himself with two original fantasy feature films, “The Dark Crystal” and “Labyrinth”, the latter produced by George Lucas and starring David Bowie, where he and his team developed the sort of animatronics and technologies that enabled “Mee-Shee the Water Giant” to be created at Shepperton Studios. The team behind these two films founded Jim Henson’s Creature Shop in 1979 with offices in London and Los Angeles.

   Jim Henson died in New York in May 1990. In 2000, The Jim Henson Company was bought by EM.TV AG, a German television merchandising and distribution company Two years later it was bought back by Jim Henson’s five children who, in 2003, sold the rights to the Muppet characters (along with Bear in the Big Blue House) to The Walt Disney Company.

6. The London-based Infatrade Group Corporation is a specialist in film finance and gap finance.