The Tenderfoot and the Tart” will be the first filmic outing for the real life married duo.
Harvey Weinstein, president of Weinstein Company, has given the green light to the first romantic comedy starring Saturday Night Live faves Will Arnett and Amy Poehler.
The two actors, who are married in real life and expecting a child this fall, will star in a "black comedy adaptation" of the famous four-act play by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called “The Tenderfoot and the Tart.” The film is tentatively scheduled for release in 2010.
The Solzhenitsyn play received its original performance at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 1970, and is set over the course of about one week in 1945 in a Stalin-era Soviet prison camp. As in many of Solzhenitsyn's works, the author paints a vivid and honest picture of the suffering prisoners and their incompetent but powerful wardens.
A television adaptation of the play was produced in 1965 by the BBC, as part of the series Play of the Month.
To “bring forward” the action, Arnett and Poehler plan to set the film not in a prison camp, but in a Burger King located in the racially diverse Adams Morgan district of Washington D.C.
“We’re setting it in a very Li Edelkoort-like world in which everyone wears separates,” says Arnett. “And the workers at the Burger King are actually federal prisoners leased out to Burger King in a privatization deal that has become typical of a more practical post-crash era.”
The action begins when Lyuba – the “tart” of the story -- is caught by her boyfriend Earl (the “tenderfoot”) making love to the branch manager in order to get extra pickles and a bigger bun.
When Earl demands that she stop seeing The Manager – “who has no name,” says Poehler -- Lyuba refuses and a conflict arises. Their dilemma is resolved in the very brief Act IV, at the end of which an injured and dejected Earl watches Lyuba enter The Manager’s office again and again and again.
“And so basically the theme of the film is do whatever you want as long as it makes you happy,” says Poehler.
The “black comedy” – “it’s so dark it’s almost char-broiled,” jokes Poehler -- explores the analogy of the low-pay fast food restaurant to a separate nation within the United States. One of the play's recurring comic themes is the idea that Earl’s honesty is worthless in the face of the realities of fast food life.
“All of the characters who prosper in the play can only do so by means of moral compromises,” says Poehler. “And the situation is made even more complex by prison rules which allow the workers to only use one of seven phrases during work hours.”
The phrases are: “Who has the best darn burgers?” “Mo beef, betta taste,” “Eat like a king, not a clown.” “Quality just tastes better,” “King Me” and “The best food for fast times.”
“And of course, the ever-popular ‘Would you like fries with that?’” adds Arnett. “Which opens a lot of doors for some exciting interior dialog to occur.”
The Poehler-Arnett film is “entirely unrelated” to a film Burger King announced in Oct. 2006 that it would be producing itself in conjunction with its ad agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, called “Above the King,” says Poehler.
“From what we’ve read in Varieety, ‘Above the King’ is a comedy about a teen misfit who lives in an apartment above a Burger King restaurant and has an unlikely friendship with an aristocrat,” says Poehler. “Whereas ‘Tenderfoot and the Tart’ is about federal prisoners being leased out by the U.S. government to a Washington D.C. area Burger King and the compromises they must make in building a new life in a restricted corporate-slash-prison-style environment in which love can still blossom.”
Poehler expects any market confusion between the two to be “fairly minimal.”
Arnett notes that “Tenderfoot” will be a challenging film technically because it has a fairly large cast of characters, mostly prisoners at the restaurant.
“They will be working in what are called ‘shifts,’ which are a eight hours long in duration,” Arnett notes.
Although slated to be produced for under $20 million, “Tenderfoot’s” original staging from Solzhenitsyn remains intact. As the film opens, truckloads of prisoners arrive onscreen, pouring and spilling boiling oil from the fry machine into the fish machine, and one scene calls for a three-story tall building made out of onion rings in the foreground of the set, with layered barbed wire and bare steppe stetching into the background "as far as the eye can see," with an excavator operating in the distance.
By setting the restaurant in the Adams-Morgan district of Washington D.C., the action lends itself nicely to numerous cameo appearances by celebrity friends of the two such as Tina Fey and Steve Carell.
“Because of its proximity to the White House, it’s a location where President Palin and Frank Rich might easily meet for a quick snack,” says Poehler. “And so it ends up being kind of ‘Love Boat-y’ and a quick but tasteful nod to the screen genius of Aaron Spelling.”
Full casting has not been announced, but the couple hopes to attract comedian Adam Corolla as the voice of BK's drive thru as well as Sarah Michelle Gellar in the role of fry machine girl and Lyuba’s best friend -- and perhaps even Mr. T.
“We kind of teasingly say that we are being real ‘agents provacateurs’ by doing this,” says Poehler. “Because both Mr T, Corolla and Geller have both been cast in real Burger King ad campaigns of the past. So it’s a very ‘art meets life’ concept we’ve come up with, and one we feel Solzhenitsyn would fully approve of.”
Solzhenitsyn lived for many years in Cavendish, Vermont, say the two – “which never had its own Burger King.”
In Gellar’s campaign for BK, the actress, who was 4 years old at the time, stated that “McDonald's burgers were 20% smaller than Burger King's” – “a fairly provocative statement for that day and age,” says Arnett, “and one which we hope to repeat.”
The deal was put together by Media Rights Capital, an offshoot of Endeavor Talent Agency, which is already working on putting together other content creator-advertiser partnerships, with the assistance of Alexandra Levy, Matt Groening and Seth McFarlane.
The Weinstein Company is an independent American film studio founded by Harvey and Bob Weinstein in 2005 after the pair left the Disney-owned Miramax Films, which they had co-founded in 1979. The Dimension Films label of Miramax followed the brothers to their new company. Advisors to the new studio include Paul Newman and Robert Redford.
Their first releases in 2005 included the dramatic thriller Derailed (starring Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen), the offbeat comedy-drama Transamerica (starring Felicity Huffman) the computer-animated family film Hoodwinked, the World War II-era dramedy Mrs. Henderson Presents (starring Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins) and the caper comedy The Matador (starring Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear).
In March 2006, The Weinstein Company announced a distribution pact with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. MGM will distribute the product domestically in theaters, while the Weinstein Company will retain long-term ownership of their product.
The Weinstein Company holds 70% stake of Genius Products, which releases all of The Weinstein Company's movies on DVD.
In July 2006, the Weinsteins and Robert L. Johnson announced the creation of a joint venture studio titled Our Stories Films, which will distribute African-American-oriented films.
In late August 2006, it was announced that the Weinstein Company and co-investors Hubbard Media Group had purchased Ovation TV, an arts-focused cable channel.
In November 2006, the Weinstein Company announced a three-year deal with Blockbuster Video to give the video renting company exclusive rights for rentals starting on January 1, 2007. However, under the First Sale Doctrine, other rental companies are able to rent the company's movies. Rental companies besides Blockbuster must purchase the product at full retail price and then convert the product into rental which can exclude exclusive material such as deleted scenes, alternate endings and other features.
The company is the co-producer, along with Miramax, of the Bravo reality series Project Runway.
In recent months, rights to films originally produced by Miramax (under the leadership of the Weinsteins), as well as some films either distributed by or had rights reverted to Miramax now lie with the Weinstein Company. For example, Genius Products/Weinstein Company Home Entertainment has reissued both released versions of Cinema Paradiso, originally distributed theatrically and on home video by Miramax.
On May 24, 2007, The Weinstein Company announced the launch of three new direct-to-video labels: The Miriam Collection, Kaleidoscope TWC, and Dimension Extreme.
Upon leaving Disney, the Weinstein's reached an agreement to bring over Rob Weisbach, the CEO of their publishing imprint, Miramax Books, to The Weinstein Company. Weisbach would continue to manage all of Miramax Books' existing titles until they were published but would acquire all new titles for Weinstein, while Disney would acquire new titles under their Hyperion imprint. Weinstein Books published its first book, “Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures,” by Amy Sedaris and Stephen Colbert, on September 4, 2007.
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