Cartoon Network has teamed with Worldwide Biggies, Albie Hecht's multimedia production company, to adapt Barry Yourgrau's nonfiction children's horror book series "NASTYbook" into a live-action/CGI film.
The deal also calls for Worldwide Biggies to develop a range of Web content based on the book series.
"NASTYbook" is described as a world populated by a horrifying albeit colorful cast of characters including an Internet-trolling witch and an alien-exchange student. It's said to be in the vein of "The Twilight Zone" but geared toward a young audience, with a scary and mysterious figure serving as a host who comes in and out of the characters' lives in each story.
Cartoon Network vp longform Ramsey Naito is spearheading the project for the channel.
Hecht said he has been an "admirer" of the book series for some time.
"Barry's weird and suspenseful stories are like a modern-day 'Grimm's Fairy Tales,' " he said.
The deal also calls for Worldwide Biggies to develop a range of Web content based on the book series.
"NASTYbook" is described as a world populated by a horrifying albeit colorful cast of characters including an Internet-trolling witch and an alien-exchange student. It's said to be in the vein of "The Twilight Zone" but geared toward a young audience, with a scary and mysterious figure serving as a host who comes in and out of the characters' lives in each story.
Cartoon Network vp longform Ramsey Naito is spearheading the project for the channel.
Hecht said he has been an "admirer" of the book series for some time.
"Barry's weird and suspenseful stories are like a modern-day 'Grimm's Fairy Tales,' " he said.
- 10/20/2008
- by By Kimberly Nordyke
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Film review: 'The Sadness of Sex'
An invigorating trip through the metaphoric world of author and performance artist Barry Yourgrau, "The Sadness of Sex" first started chatting up festival audiences in 1995 and arrived Friday for its Los Angeles theatrical debut at the Los Feliz 3 Cinemas.
The low-budget Tara Releasing production, which opens with Yourgrau poking around the shuttered Tower Theatre on Broadway in downtown L.A., was filmed primarily in Toronto.
It's a stiff dose of dreams and nightmares, fantasies and prophecies, with host-narrator-lead actor Yourgrau probing tender areas of the male psyche and often erupting into passionate prose and poetry.
Composed of 15 vignettes about romance and relationships narrated by Yourgrau, "The Sadness of Sex" is comparable to the films of Spalding Gray, while English director Rupert Wainwright ("Blank Check") employs many visual flourishes and stylistic variations, including grainy black-and-white footage and some terrific animation.
In performance-artist mode, Yourgrau is a compelling presence when he's speaking directly to the camera in the many scenes where he's onstage before an eclectic audience of emblematic women and one oddly out-of-place family.
A few of the shorter tales are delivered with no visual accompaniment, but many feature Yourgrau and Peta Wilson (from Warners' cable TV series "La Femme Nikita") in a serial look at love and lovers.
Surreally comic, "Sadness" is not always original, but the filmmakers and the material keep one attentive.
In the Gogol-esque scenario of a woman's sex parts breaking loose and terrorizing a neighborhood, Wainwright and Yourgrau parody horror movies of the 1950s, a la Woody Allen's famous giant breast in "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (but Were Afraid to Ask)." But in a hilarious escalation of events, they go much further with the concept into screwball erotica.
Although Wainwright's background in commercials and music videos is always evident -- with constant cutting between formats and an overall fashion advertising slickness -- on the big screen, "Sadness" is greater than the sum of its parts.
THE SADNESS OF SEX
Tara Releasing
Skyvision Partners presents
a Rupert Wainwright film
Director Rupert Wainwright
Executive producers Jim Reid, Howard Rosen
Producers David Lancaster, Rupert Maconick
Writers Barry Yourgrau, Rupert Wainwright
Director of photography Andre Pienaar
Editor Brian Berdan
Production designer Franco De Cotiis
Costume designer Mariska M. Nicholson
Black and white, color/stereo
Cast:
Host/narrator Barry Yourgrau
Girl of His Dreams Peta Wilson
Running time -- 86 minutes
No MPAA rating...
The low-budget Tara Releasing production, which opens with Yourgrau poking around the shuttered Tower Theatre on Broadway in downtown L.A., was filmed primarily in Toronto.
It's a stiff dose of dreams and nightmares, fantasies and prophecies, with host-narrator-lead actor Yourgrau probing tender areas of the male psyche and often erupting into passionate prose and poetry.
Composed of 15 vignettes about romance and relationships narrated by Yourgrau, "The Sadness of Sex" is comparable to the films of Spalding Gray, while English director Rupert Wainwright ("Blank Check") employs many visual flourishes and stylistic variations, including grainy black-and-white footage and some terrific animation.
In performance-artist mode, Yourgrau is a compelling presence when he's speaking directly to the camera in the many scenes where he's onstage before an eclectic audience of emblematic women and one oddly out-of-place family.
A few of the shorter tales are delivered with no visual accompaniment, but many feature Yourgrau and Peta Wilson (from Warners' cable TV series "La Femme Nikita") in a serial look at love and lovers.
Surreally comic, "Sadness" is not always original, but the filmmakers and the material keep one attentive.
In the Gogol-esque scenario of a woman's sex parts breaking loose and terrorizing a neighborhood, Wainwright and Yourgrau parody horror movies of the 1950s, a la Woody Allen's famous giant breast in "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (but Were Afraid to Ask)." But in a hilarious escalation of events, they go much further with the concept into screwball erotica.
Although Wainwright's background in commercials and music videos is always evident -- with constant cutting between formats and an overall fashion advertising slickness -- on the big screen, "Sadness" is greater than the sum of its parts.
THE SADNESS OF SEX
Tara Releasing
Skyvision Partners presents
a Rupert Wainwright film
Director Rupert Wainwright
Executive producers Jim Reid, Howard Rosen
Producers David Lancaster, Rupert Maconick
Writers Barry Yourgrau, Rupert Wainwright
Director of photography Andre Pienaar
Editor Brian Berdan
Production designer Franco De Cotiis
Costume designer Mariska M. Nicholson
Black and white, color/stereo
Cast:
Host/narrator Barry Yourgrau
Girl of His Dreams Peta Wilson
Running time -- 86 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 4/8/1997
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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