Home page for the adaptation of a scene from the 1904-novel by WH Hudson, Green Mansions
5-min, 2-person project for Intermediate Directing class at USC (w/ J. Kagan)
Script (updated Feb 8)
Back cover of the book says this:
A failed revolutionary attempt drives the hero of Hudson's novel to seek refuge in the primeval forests of south-western Venezuela. There, in the green mansions, Abel encounters the wood-nymph Rima, the last survivor of a mysterious aboriginal race. The love that flowers between them is soon overshadowed by cruelty and sorrow ...
1998 Intro says this:
"When it first appeared in 1904, Green Mansions was a cult book and its author a cult figure, favored by literary coteries rather than by the general reading public. Hudson's Romance of the Tropical Forest became a best-seller after its republication in the USA by Alfred A. Knoft in 1916. The new edition carried a foreword by John Galsworthy, praising Hudson as a very great writer - since the death of Tolstoy, the most valuable our Age posseses .. Hudson died in 1922 - the year of The Waste Land and Ulysses."
Richard (playing Abel)
Dawn (playing Rima, the wood nymph)
To
be shot at the Jungle
garden
at the Huntington Botanical Gardens (photo)
with a Canon GL1,
The Huntington
Library
has one of the world's finest collection of rare books, with materials dating
back to 3500 B.C.
In 1959, MGM made the book into a movie, starring Audrey Hepburn & Anthony (Psycho) Perkins .. "filmed on location in the pristine jungles of Venezuela, Columbia & British Guiana." The back cover of the VHS says, "Abel (Perkins) is a political fugitive seeking gold in South America to fund his revenge against his father's assassins. Imprisoned by natives, Abel is forced to relinquish his own personal crusade and take up the mission of his captors; he is sent into the forbidden forest with orders to kill Rima the "bird-girl" (Hepburn) an enchanting innocent whom the Indians believe to be an evil spirit. Immediately drawn to one another, Abel & Rima set out on a quest of their own .."
Update (Feb 23): Posted the 5-min movie here