Movie About Roald Dahl’s Quest To Save His Son In Works At Hyde Park
EXCLUSIVE: Ashok Amritraj’s Hyde Park Entertainment Group has acquired Jonathan Newman’s original screenplay Pure Imagination which centers around a specific period in Roald Dahl’s life when his four-month old son was tragically struck by a taxi, and the Charlie & The Chocolate Factory author went to great lengths to save the boy’s life. Newman will also direct the movie, which is scheduled to go into production during the first quarter of 2017. Pure Imagination is set during 1960 when Dahl was living in New York and writing Charlie & The Chocolate Factory. With medical technology unable to help his son, Dahl enlisted the help of a toymaker to set about inventing a medical valve to save his son. His invention would go on to save the lives of over 3,000 children, and was the precursor to the cerebral shunts used by doctors today. Pure Imagination will also follow Dahl’s marriage to Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal during this time.
Newman recently directed the Michael Sheen-Sam Neill movie The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box. While Dahl’s work has always been coveted for the big screen, the late author’s latest work to be mounted is Steven Spielberg’s The BFG which made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and opens here in the U.S./Canada on July 1 via Disney/DreamWorks.
Hyde Park and Image Nation Abu Dhabi continue their long-term feature film partnership with their next release, the recently-announced thriller Prey, a co-production with Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Productions directed by Franck Khalfoun which is filming this month on location in Southeast Asia. Recent releases from Hyde Park include the critically-acclaimed 99 Homes and the feature adaptation of the Anne Rice novel The Young Messiah. Hyde Park also just had the LA Film Festival debut of Stephen Gyllenhaal’s So B. It, based on Sarah Weeks’s New York Times best-selling children’s book of the same name.
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