Want to know the status of a particular movie, TV show, or band? Wondering what a certain actress is up to these days? Send your entertainment-related questions to [email protected] – with your first name, city and country – and we’ll try to answer as many as we can.
Question: I heard that I Can’t Think Straight is going to be a TV show. Is it true?
ÔÇò Lesley M.
Answer: I reached out to Aida Kattan, the head of the Los Angeles office of writer-director Shamim Sarif‘s Enlightenment Films, and she confirmed that I Can’t Think Straight, the series, is indeed in development by Sarif and her wife and co-producer Hanan Kattan.
According to Aida, Sarif is currently writing a pilot and series arc, and she’s aiming for a North American network/broadcaster. If it gets developed by a network, it would take another year to go into production.
[The film’s stars] Lisa Ray and Sheetal Sheth are both attached at this point to star in the show, which would be a one hour drama. The series would have less of the broad humour of the film, but would still contain subtle humour and a chance to explore Tala, Leyla and their families in depth as characters building on some of the character development that was part of the novel version of I Can’t Think Straight.The series would probably begin where the movie begins — with Tala engaged and meeting Leyla, but would move quickly to bring them together, and look at the reactions of their families. The series would follow the main characters in each family and develop their own storylines and arcs too.
Shamim Sarif told AfterEllen.com:
Hanan and I are thrilled to have this chance to re-visit and greatly expand Tala and Leyla’s worlds. TV is perhaps even more competitive and hard to break into than movie making, but we are enjoying the process of trying! And we’d like to thank the commitment and unfailing support of all the fans of I Can’t Think Straight and The World Unseen, because their responses to the movies has inspired us to look at new ways to explore these stories.
Let’s all keep our fingers crossed that ICTS is going to be one of many antidotes to the current television lesbian drought. We’ll keep you posted on the progress of the project as it develops!
Question: I’ve held off on buying the L Word DVDs because I really want a complete boxed set, such as Showtime put out for Queer as Folk. I was wondering if you knew if there were any plans to release a complete box set, and if so, when it would come out?
ÔÇò Hannah
Answer: The complete series on DVD will be released October 20, 2009, and is currently available for pre-order online.
Question:What can you tell me about the web series Venice that Crystal Chappell (Olivia) from Guiding Light is involved with? It’s not clear to me if she’s acting or producing or both and how much lesbian content it will have.
ÔÇò Peggy, Florida
Answer: Otalia fans are rejoicing at the news of the creation of the new webseries Venice. The show will tentatively reunite Chappell with her GL co-star and love-interest, Jessica Leccia (Natalia). I say “tentatively” because there are still some contractual issues that may need to be resolved in order for Chappell to play the series’s lead Gina (although she’s definitely co-producing it); you can stay up on that as it unfolds in our forum thread about Venice.
Casting so far includes Leccia as photographer “Ani,” Hillary B Smith (One Life to Live) as “Guya,” and Jordan Clarke (Guiding Light) as Gina’s father.
Chappell has been Tweeting up a storm of late, and dropping lots of hints about what will transpire on Venice. Some of those Tweets have Otalia fans expecting a continuation of the Chappell-Leccia romance set in motion with their characters on Guiding Light.
AE reader HawtBlondeChick recently posted on the AE Venice reader forum an exchange between Chappell and a follower on Twitter. When the follower asked when she could expect to see a kiss (ostensibly between Chappell and Leccia), Chappell replied, “Can u wait 30 seconds into the series?”
The show has its own Twitter account, twitter.com/venicetheseries, and you can keep up with the developing series by following it or Chappell on Twitter, or checking out the series website (which also features clues about the direction of the show).
You can also check back here at AfterEllen.com in the next month or so, when we’ll tentatively be running an interview with Crystal Chappell about Venice.
Question: I loved the first series of Joni & Susanna when it came on AfterEllen.com last year. Are there any plans for further series?
ÔÇò Madeleine, Edinburgh, Scotland
Answer: I tracked down the out co-creator and co-star of the series, Joni Lefkowitz, and she told me:
Unfortunately, there is no season two of Joni & Susanna in the near future, but we’re dying to make more. In the meantime, we’re keeping busy writing a Judd Apatow-style female buddy comedy for New Line starring Leslie Mann and Elizabeth Banks that will hopefully shoot this winter.
A Judd Apatow-style female buddy film? I once would have thought that was an oxymoron, but this sounds encouraging. Sign me up!
Question: I remember a while back you guys mentioning a TV show called Hackett with a “sexy 20’s lesbian.” What’s the deal with that show?
ÔÇòAya
Answer: Wow, your memory of AE content is better than mine!
Back in February 2007, in our Best. Lesbian. Week. Ever. column, we reported on Hackett:
“There’s a recurring lesbian character in Hackett, a half-hour, single camera comedy in the works for Fox about a bad-boy literary luminary who escapes his troubles with women and a disgraced career teaching at Yale to become a public high school teacher in Ohio. One of his fellow teachers is a woman named Tam, who is described in the casting call as a “sexy 20’s lesbian” whose lover has left her.”
The show starred Donal Logue (in the title role) Rachel Boston, and Morgan Murphy, and was directed by Barry Sonnenfeld (who went on to Executive Produce Pushing Daisies). The character “Tam” is not listed in the IMDb.com credits, so there’s no telling who would have played that role, or if it was ever developed at all.
Alas, Hackett was one of many pilots that failed to make the cut. In fact, according to Variety, the survival rate of the television pilot is not good, “Each year, the nets order about 20 pilots a piece (about evenly split, half comedy, half drama), which are then cast and filmed for consideration for the fall skeds. But only about half a dozen pilots are picked up to become the premiere episodes. The other pilots are never heard from again ÔÇò and are rarely ever seen beyond network boardrooms.”
Of course, the internet has changed the game a bit, and many pilots have risen from the network bone yard and found new life online. If you need proof, check out Nancylee Myatt‘s pilot for the lesbian police drama Nikki & Nora (starring Christina Cox and Liz Vassey) which has a huge online fanbase and is being revisited/satirized by Myatt herself in Ladycops.Yes, I know, it’s totally meta.
Question: The Ghostella videos on AE were really funny. What else is Stacie Ponder working on?
ÔÇò Lacey, Atlanta
Answer: I had the pleasure of working on a few of the Ghostella films and can tell you that they were just as much fun to make as they are to watch. So I was happy to pass along your question to Stacie because she’s very excited about her latest endeavor. This was her response:
Currently I’m working on a little project I call “a bowl of cereal” and if I may boast, it’s going rather well.
Really, though, I’ve been keeping quite busy gettin’ my horror on since the season finale of Ghostella’s Haunted Tomb. A while back I directed a lengthy trailer for a fake horror movie called Deadly Dress 4: Never A Bride. It’s features Ghostella alums Lena Headey, Bridget McManus, Heidi Martinuzzi, and some broad named Karman.
Lately I’ve been teaming up with my fellow filmmaker/Fangoria Spooksmodel Shannon Lark to make some serious horror films, quite different than the goofy Ghostella-style stuff.
Our first effort, Ludlow, is about a woman slipping in and out of consciousness and reality while she’s holed up in a motel room, on the run from her abusive ex-boyfriend. It was meant to be a short but turned out to be over an hour long; right now we’re raising money in order to shoot enough additional footage to make it my first feature film. My first feature, yay!
We’re set to resume shooting mid-August; if folks donate ten bucks, they’ll get their name in the credits of the movie. All money raised will go to fund Ludlow and the many projects Shannon and I have lined up to work on together. I’m incredibly excited about it, and I’ve been boring the world with all the details over at my website, Final Girl, for months now.
If anyone’s into reading as well as watching, I can be found in the pages of Rue Morgue Magazine and on the web at AMC TV’s Horror Hacker blog and, of course, my beloved Final Girl.
Well, I can’t be found there literally, but…you know…stuff I’ve written can. Now if you’ll excuse me, my Mini-Wheats are getting soggy.
I attended the screening of the “short” version of Ludlow, and it was stunning. So if you can spare the change, I highly encourage you to make a contribution to Ponder’s feature-length fund. Everyone is always talking about the high price of fame. Who knew it could only cost $10?
A special thanks goes out to AE reader TruMischief for her invaluable research assistance with the Ask AfterEllen.com column.
A new edition of Ask AfterEllen.com is published every other Tuesday or so. Have a question for us? Email it to [email protected]. For more entertainment news, read previous editions of Ask AfterEllen.com, and check out AfterElton.com’s weekly entertainment Q&A column, Ask The Flying Monkey.
