FILM & TV RIGHTS
FILM & TV RIGHTS
This section highlights the availability of selected international book rights, film and television rights and animation rights. Please contact us at PO Box 766, Kew, 3101 Australia if you are interested in acquiring rights in the projects listed below or are interested in acquiring rights in the work of any of our clients listed in other sections of our web site. Please see information about our Clients mentioned below and for information about other properties.
Animation and Live Action for Children and Families
- The Peg Leg Meg Voyages by Nan Bodsworth
Peg Leg Meg is a Penguin Aussie Bite (1999). It is the first in a swashbuckling series of books about the adventures of Meg MacGregor, a brave but reluctant pirate girl and her attempts to escape from her father’s pirate stronghold, find the great MacAdam treasure and restore it to her mother’s family. The stories are fast-paced and humourous and involve some extremely colourful characters and an honest, hard-working, clever young girl as the heroine. A preliminary proposal is available to develop this series of stories into a format suitable for television. Could be animation or live action drama.
Books Available for Film Options
- Peeling the Onion by Wendy Orr
Finding yourself in hospital, in a bed of shattered glass, is traumatic. Coming to terms with multiple fractures and probable long-term difficulties is something else again – slow, painful, full of obstacles and questions with no clear answers. Anna is used to being athletic, popular, ‘normal’. Now she feels the layers of her familiar self being peeled away: nothing is normal or easy. Can she pick up the pieces of her life? What part will Hayden and Luke play? And who, now, is Anna Duncan?
This was an Honour Book in the 1997 Children’s Book Council Awards Older Readers Section and is being studied in many secondary schools. It is a dramatic story that lends itself to film adaptation. Peeling the Onion has been translated into Danish, Italian, German and Dutch and is published in English in Australasia, the UK and North America.
- Till Debt Do Us Part by Angela Greenwood and Catherine McKimm
Angela and Tom arrived with their 4 young children in Australia to a beautiful Sydney day in 1986. They had successfully run pubs and hotels in England and emigrated as business migrants with about $1million. They quickly settled into family life in Coffs Harbour and because Tom had always looked after the financial side of their businesses, he arranged to invest their money with the ANZ Bank in Coffs Harbour when interest rates were about 18%.
About 2 years later, Angela opened a letter from Tom’s father saying that he was sending over £12,500 to tide them over. Angela’s mind was in turmoil – why did they need money? With interest, they should have still had over $1million in the bank. When Tom arrived home from the golf course, Angela confronted him with the letter and Tom told her that the money had all gone. He had lost the lot “investing” on the foreign exchange markets through the bank. The bank and the bank manager were reaping huge commissions on every contract Tom bought and sold, and they had been actively encouraging him to gamble away his family’s life savings. Angela decided to tackle the bank manager and marched into the bank, creating a scene until she saw him. His attitude was that if her husband chose not to tell her what he was doing, then that wasn’t their problem. Angela felt that it certainly was their problem and so, together with country lawyer, Catherine McKimm, they mounted a legal fight that took 6 years and made national headlines. Additional complications ensued during the case, when Angela and the banking expert fell in love, which had serious repercussions in the running of the case.
The case settled “on the steps of the court” – but it still wasn’t over. The Sydney lawyers would only pay Angela one-third of her costs. So, a further battle followed between Angela and the bank direct, to obtain her full costs. After a further year of negotiations, (and a little coercion from Angela) Angela obtained her costs in full . Throughout their triumphs and disappointments over the years of fighting the bank, Angela and Catherine’s relationship evolved into a lifelong very special friendship. “Till Debt Do Us Part” is Angela’s and Catherine’s story – an extraordinary tale of two women triumphing over the system and a bank and its lawyers behaving badly.
- Eleven Days of Hell My true story of kidnapping, terror, torture and historic FBI and KGB rescue
by Yvonne Bornstein
On January 6, 1992 Yvonne Weinstock and her then-husband Danny landed in Moscow on a business trip. They had just left the airport when they were ambushed, kidnapped and held for ransom for 11 horrifying days in a dilapidated country house by a gang of Russian "gypsies" who were in reality far more cold-blooded conspirators in a sinister plot that joined the Russian Mob, ex-KGB agents and early al-Qaeda operatives looking to fund terrorism, no matter the cost of human life.
This incredible story of those “Eleven Days of Hell –My True Story of Kidnapping, Terror, Torture and Historic FBI and KGB Rescue” as told by Yvonne was published by New Holland Publishers in Australia in October 2008. Against all odds, the FBI and Russian intelligence agencies joined forces for the first and only time in history. Reliving the agony, horror and torture she endured, Bornstein also unravels the twists and turns of the rescue mission. Through her own research into the confidential case, Bornstein skillfully weaves a heart-thumping narrative of drama and intrigue worthy of a top-notch spy novel.
Yvonne Bornstein writes from the heart about the devastating impact of the kidnapping on her marriage and her life and shares her new found appreciation for the simple, meaningful things she had come to overlook in her drive to the top of the corporate business world; lessons in life that apply to all of us.
Stuart Beattie, the screenwriter of Collateral and Pirates of the Caribbean: "A terrifyingly true thriller that grips you from the first page and never lets you go! Yvonne Bornstein has shown remarkable courage and skill by digging deep into her nightmares and detailing them on the page in a way that will leave you breathless..."
GOLVAN ARTS MANAGEMENT • PO Box 766, Kew, Victoria 3101 Australia • golvan@ozemail.com.au