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| FOUR FOR THE ROAD
around the bend
TEN YEARS IN GESTATION, JORDAN ROBERTS’ SCREENPLAY AROUND THE BEND (ON WHICH HE ALSO MAKES HIS DIRECTORIAL DEBUT) HAS ATTRACTED A TOP CAST, DRAWN BY THIS FUNNY, TOUCHING TALE OF FOUR GENERATIONS OF MEN TRYING TO COME TO TERMS WITH THAT DIFFICULT LITTLE WORD, ‘FAMILY’. MAX LEVANT TAKES TO THE ROAD WITH THEM.
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Being a carpenter, as Harrison Ford discovered before he was hired to play Han Solo, is an honest enough trade, but you don’t make a whole lot of money. Jordan Roberts probably felt the same: carpentry was what he was doing, too, before producer Julie Kirkham hired him to do a few rewrites for her.
But Kirkham’s offer wasn’t a complete gamble. The producer (whose credits include Black Rain and Knockaround Guys) had already read an early draft of a script by Roberts, and “knew she’d found something special,” says husband and producing partner, Elliott Lewitt. Now, almost 10 years after Kirkham first read it, she and Lewitt have teamed up with Warner Independent Pictures to make that initial script: a touching comedy called Around the Bend, inspired by Roberts’ efforts to track down his absentee father.
Along the way, Around the Bend has picked up admirers the way winners pick up medals, with Mark Gill, who runs WIP, among its most fervent. Gill came across Roberts’ screenplay when the writer attended the Sundance Producers Lab and continued to champion it after taking up his new job as head of Warner’s specialist division.
His was a crucial role in bringing the project to fruition. “Mark made all the difference in the world,” says Lewitt. “There were a number of incarnations and passes of the script. Some extraneous plot fell away. But Mark got behind it and we got very lucky.”
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