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Exclusive: Award-winning filmmaker Lydia Dean Pilcher has signed with Echo Lake Entertainment for management—also announcing today that she has acquired the rights to Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism, a bestselling memoir from Dawn Prince-Hughes that she plans to adapt into a feature, as both director and producer.

In the true story, published by Random House in 2004, Dawn Prince is on the brink of survival as a homeless gay teenager from the wilderness of Montana, searching for connection on the streets of 1980s Seattle. When she escapes to the zoo for the oxygen of nature, she unexpectedly makes a primal connection with the Silverback gorilla, Congo.

Dawn gets a job at the zoo and begins a journey of self-discovery as she learns from Congo how to love, how to see herself in the gorillas, and ultimately in other human people.

Photo: 'Radium Girls'/Juno Films Radium Girls, a new film from directors Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler, first screened at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Distribution delays and Covid-19 caused the film’s wide release to be delayed, but there’s something quite opportune about seeing the film in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. Against great odds, the radium girls rallied together to challenge U.S. Radium, a corrupt and monolithic corporation that prioritized its own interests over the livelihoods of its employees and its customers. Despite deliberate misinformation paid for by U.S. Radium to discredit their righteous cause and attempt to turn public opinion against them, the girls strive to ally themselves with activists, scientists, lawyers, and members of the Consumers League to create real change. There’s a lot of historical contexts to process with a film like this, and engaging with that context here reveals...

Producer Lydia Dean Pilcher, after decades of collaborating with filmmakers like Katheryn Bigelow, Wes Anderson and Gina Prince Bythewood, is stepping behind the camera for the first time as a feature director. Her directorial debut, the historical drama “Radium Girls,” is opening in theaters and on demand on Friday.

The movie, set in New Jersey in the late ’20s, follows two teenage sisters (portrayed by Joey King and Abby Quinn) employed at a nearby American Radium plant. Those working on the assembly line to paint dials were instructed to lick the tip of their paintbrushes to increase their precision, ingesting lethal amounts of radium (an element they were told wasn’t harmful) in the process. But after the self-luminous paint began to poison factory workers the young activists attempt to expose the corporate scandal. The lasting precedent that the case, based on true events, set for workplace safety is what...

The half-life of radium-226, the toxic isotope touted as a miracle cure-all in the early 20th century and used in phosphorescent paint, is around 1,600 years. That of “Radium Girls,” the David-and Goliath story of a handful of young women taking Big Radium to court in the 1920s, is presumably much shorter.

In the two-and-a-half years since it premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, co-directors Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler’s dramatization seems to have lost quite a bit of whatever luster it might have once had. Scrupulously sincere in its approach and well-meaning to a fault in intention, the film aims for inspirational true story, but is sadly uninspired, and its relationship to real history is obscured by the schematic way it is fictionalized.

Playing characters who are an amalgam of the real heroines of the radium scandal, the film stars Joey King and Abby Quinn as sisters Bessie and Josephine Cavallo,...

In the early part of the 20th century, “miracle cures” were all the rage, though no substance captivated Americans quite so much as radium, a mined element that was used in everything from luminescent paints to what was essentially marketed as an early version of an energy drink (one that supposedly cured impotence!). Radium was everywhere, with not just little regard for its inherent radioactive properties and the attendant danger, but even knowledge of how deadly the seemingly wondrous “elixir” really was. Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler’s “Radium Girls” smartly opens with such information on quick display: archival footage and publications tout radium’s properties, while familiar character actor Adam LeFevre appears as a carnival barker selling “the most beneficial of elements” to an eager crowd.

But while consumers might have been hyped up on radium’s alleged wonders, it was another class altogether that paid mightily for...

You can feel the urgency fueling Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler’s historical drama about a little-known, shameful episode in our country’s past. Despite taking place in the 1920s, Radium Girls feels particularly relevant in these times when the current administration has devoted itself with a passion to rolling back protections for workers. Although its low-budget cinematic execution feels a bit lacking at times, the film fulfills a vital function with its dramatization of an important chapter in America’s history of labor reform.

The story, which features both real-life figures and composite characters, begins in 1925, when sisters ...

You can feel the urgency fueling Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler’s historical drama about a little-known, shameful episode in our country’s past. Despite taking place in the 1920s, Radium Girls feels particularly relevant in these times when the current administration has devoted itself with a passion to rolling back protections for workers. Although its low-budget cinematic execution feels a bit lacking at times, the film fulfills a vital function with its dramatization of an important chapter in America’s history of labor reform.

The story, which features both real-life figures and composite characters, begins in 1925, when sisters ...

Radium Girls Cine Mosaic Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten Director: Ginny Mohler, Lydia Dean Pilcher Writer: Ginny Mohler, Brittany Shaw Cast: Joey King, Abby Quinn, Cara Seymour, Scott Shepherd, Susan Heyward, Neal Huff, Collin Kelly-Sordelet Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 9/28/20 Opens: October 23, 2020 Pity executives in […]

The post Radium Girls Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

During World War II, Prime Minister Winston Churchill put a network of spies behind enemy lines to aid the Resistance in Nazi-occupied countries. The Soe (Special Operations Executive) was set up to train women for the role. A Call to Spy, an IFC release opening in theaters and on demand October 2, follows three women who played crucial roles for the Soe in France. A Call to Spy is the first solo feature credit for director Lydia Dean Pilcher, after co-directing Radium Girls with Ginny Mohler. A veteran producer, Pilcher has worked in a wide variety of genres for the […]...

During World War II, Prime Minister Winston Churchill put a network of spies behind enemy lines to aid the Resistance in Nazi-occupied countries. The Soe (Special Operations Executive) was set up to train women for the role. A Call to Spy, an IFC release opening in theaters and on demand October 2, follows three women who played crucial roles for the Soe in France. A Call to Spy is the first solo feature credit for director Lydia Dean Pilcher, after co-directing Radium Girls with Ginny Mohler. A veteran producer, Pilcher has worked in a wide variety of genres for the […]...

Joey King and Abby Quinn star as sisters working in a radium factory who discover that the luminous material is lethally radioactive in the first trailer for Radium Girls, due in theaters April 3. Produced by Lily Tomlin and directed by Oscar-nominated producer Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler, the film is a dramatized account of the real-life scandal surrounding the United States Radium and the Radium Dial Corporations, which knowingly exposed their workers to highly radioactive material in the early 20th century. King and Quinn play Bessie and Jo respectively, two sisters who paint watch faces with …...

Exclusive: Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler’s feature Radium Girls has been snapped up by Juno Films, which is taking all North American rights and English-speaking territories. The pic, which made its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, will open April 3 at the Quad Cinema in New York followed by a national rollout.

Starring Emmy and Golden Globe nominee Joey King and Little Women‘s Abby Quinn, Radium Girls follows teen sisters who dream of Hollywood and Egyptian pyramids as they paint luminous watch dials at the American Radium factory in New Jersey. When Jo (Quinn) loses a tooth, Bessie’s (King) world is turned upside down as a mystery slowly unravels. She discovers a corporate cover-up and, in a radical coming-of-age story, Bessie and the Radium Girls decide to take on American Radium. The national sensation following the case of the Radium Girls ultimately led to significant...

The Tribeca Film Festival is less than two weeks away, but this year's 17th annual event has found room to add another movie and TV series.

The festival will host the world premiere of the Lily Tomlin executive-produced Radium Girls, starring Joey King and Abby Quinn. The film is based on the true story of women in the early 20th century who worked at the U.S. Radium Factory painting glow in the dark watches. But by licking their paint brushes, the women ultimately developed cancer. Radium Girls is directed by veteran producer Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler,...