Warner Bros. on board
Will the Galveston hurricane be turned into the next Titanic?
Galveston's devastation is the backdrop of a new movie project in the works.
Polly Johnsen, producer
Daniel Sussman, screenwriter
When it comes to natural disasters, there's been more than enough fodder for dramatic interpretation.
Instead studios have stuck to farfetched, overblown films about volcanos, alien invasions and Mayan calendar doomsday predictions, with mediocre results.
But that could all be changing. Warner Bros. has bought a script about the 1900 hurricane in Galveston, the largest natural disaster in American history. It killed 8,000 people — four times as many as Hurricane Katrina. The Category 4 hurricane virtually wiped out the city, known at the time as "the Wall Street of the Southwest" and allowed Houston to eclipse the island city as the regional metropolis.
The screenplay by Daniel Sussman, a former writer for The Practice, uses the hurricane as a backdrop for dramatic arcs about "a pair of young lovers on the verge of being separated, a struggle for power among various bureaucracies and a bitter love triangle involving two brothers," according to Risky Business.
Sounds more like Titanic than 2012 — for the better. And in reminding America of some of the recent hurricane devastation, it may look to Hereafter, the new Matt Damon movie that incorporates the 2004 tsunami.
The film is being produced by Polly Johnsen, who was also behind Cop Out and has several big movies in the works, including the new Excalibur and a film version of The Abstinence Teacher reportedly starring Sandra Bullock and Steve Carell.
Johnsen has a first-look deal with Warner Bros. giving WB the first chance to take on a project, which means Galveston was snapped up as soon as it was offered, a good omen. Galveston is tentatively scheduled for a 2013 release according to IMDb.
Can Hollywood do a good job telling the story of Galveston? Who would you want to see staring or directing?
