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Tag: Abigail Thomas

  • Salma Hayek Already Starring in Three Films in 2014

    Salma Hayek, the 47-year-old Latina actress famous for her roles in movies such as the 1996 Hollywood adaptation of Quentin Tarantino’s dark screenplay, From Dusk Til Dawn, and, most recently, Grown Ups and Grown Ups 2.

    Now, the Mexican-born wife and mother is taking on three more films: A Three Dog Life, The Septembers of Shiraz, and Everly.

    A Three Dog Life, a film based on the bestselling memoir by Abigail Thomas, will co-star Hayek and John Travolta, both of the stars’ first major roles in some time. It is being co-produced by J. Todd Harris and Clark Peterson and directed by Nick Guthe.

    A Three Dog Life is based on the story told by Abigail Thomas (Hayek) whose husband, Rich (Travolta), is tragically hit by a car and forced to live in an institution. Thomas moves her entire life from Manhattan to a small country town to be closer to her incapacitated husband.

    The book version of the new film was an instant hit when it was first published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2006, and was named one of the Los Angeles Times Favorite Nonfiction Books of the Year and a Washington Post Book World Best Book of the Year. In September 2013, the memoir again climbed the New York Times Bestsellers List, peaking at #2.

    Harris and Peterson both recently discussed the film, which is currently being shopped at Berlin’s European Film Market.

    “Nick’s adaptation of Abigail’s emotional memoir is incredibly moving,” Harris says. “It’s rare to find such dramatic and honest material.”

    Harris’ co-producer, Clark Peterson, added, “With Nick directing this cast, the ingredients are in place for a poignant and engrossing movie.”

    Hayek will also be starring in yet another poignant film, The Septembers of Shiraz. This book-turned-movie is also loosely based on autobiographical events; author Delia Sofer was 10 when her family fled Iran during its uprising. The Septembers of Shiraz tells the story of a Jewish family trying to escape the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1981.

    In the thriller, Hayek will play an imprisoned gem dealer’s wife; the other major players in Shiraz are Hayek’s jailed husband, daughter, and United States-situated son, and Hayek’s attempt to flee the war-torn nation with her daughter and husband.

    It is being produced by Gerard Butler, Alan Siegel, and Heidi Jo Markel, and directed by Wayne Blair.

    Production is hoping to commence in April.

    Hayek will be appearing in another film that is also being shopped around the EFM; Everly , an action-thriller directed by Joe Lynch, is co-produced and financed by a new Singapore company, Vega, Baby!, as well as Crime Scene Pictures and Anonymous Content. Dimension and Radius have already purchased the American rights to the film set for release later this year.

    Everly tells the story of a woman being hunted by her mob boss’ ex’s associates, and her pursuit to evade the assailants, alongside her daughter and mother.

    Main image courtesy Georges Biard via Wikimedia Commons.

  • John Travolta Wants to Be in Bond…James Bond

    John Travolta, the 59 year-old father and Academy Award-nominated actor, has become the epitome of a professional in his career; he has been one of Hollywood’s top male actors (and sex symbols) for over forty years, reaching a level of success that few ever do, being cast as the leading male in film after film, decade after decade.

    According to him. Travolta first broke into show business at 17, when he won his first professional role after spending two summers at a theatre camp.

    The Saturday Night Fever and Grease heartthrob relates that his interest in show business was borne long before his time at the camp and his first “real” acting job, however.

    “I could take out the garbage and I would be heard, Travolta told The Telegraph. “I never needed to do a lot to get attention, so my performing honestly came out of joy.”

    John Travolta has long-been one of the world’s most loved actors, as his humility and obvious zest for life have always been apparent, both through his personal, and professional, work.

    The Pulp Fiction star says that being humble is a trait he attributes to having come by after experiencing, both, life’s greatest successes, as well as its most debilitating losses and suffering; Travolta lost his long-time girlfriend, Diana Hyland, in 1977 after a lengthy battle with cancer. Then, in January 2009, the star and his wife of twenty-three years, actress Kelly Preston, experienced the most personal and heart-wrenching tragedy a parent can imagine: their 16-year-old son, Jett, who was the spitting image of his father, passed away after having a seizure in the Bahamas.

    Still, even in light of two such extremely painful events, Travolta says he has always been “a glass-half-full man…an optimist by nature.”

    “I’m probably less terrified of death than your average fellow now, because people so near to me have suffered before their time and I just feel that if they can do it, so can I. The edge – the panic that most people feel – has been taken off death for me. I almost feel like it’s disrespectful to fear it when others have been able to do it.”

    That perspective proved to serve the actor well, when, a year after Jett’s death, Travolta and Preston learned that they were expecting their third child; son Benjamin, now three, was born in November 2010.

    Travolta now says he has his life back on track after two years of angst and torment over Jett’s untimely death, and contributes his positive outlook today to Scientology, the religion he has been practicing since 1975.

    Travolta has taken a hiatus from acting for the last several years, staying almost entirely out of the public eye; now, however, Danny Zuko is back, playing a husband who suffers from memory loss after a car accident opposite Salma Hayek in the film, A Three Dog Life, based on the best-selling memoir by Abigail Thomas. The movie is being produced by screenplay adapter, Nick Guthe, and J. Todd Harris and Clark Peterson; The Solution Entertainment is currently looking for a buyer of the film in the European Film Market.

    In A Three Dog Life, Travolta will play the amnesiac husband of Abigail Thomas (Salma Hayek), a far cry from the villainous roles he has become so well-known for, and that he is still enjoying playing; he says that his quest for the bad-guy roles will probably continue until the day he gets to play such a character in a James Bond movie.

    He told The Telegraph that his still-unachieved goal will prevent him from really being able to “close the chapter on playing villains” until he is cast in a Bond.

    “I would love that,” he says. “They’re going a different way with their villain in this next film but I’ve spoken to Barbara Broccoli [James Bond producer] about it and she loves the idea, so that would be great.”

    Main image courtesy Michael Wolf via Wikimedia Commons.