Alexandra Kerry To Direct First Feature Film

[Dr Ron]

http://liberalvaluesblog.com/?p=1041

Story from New York Magazine:

John Kerry’s given up on the White House. But his filmmaker daughter Alexandra’s Tinseltown dreams are coming true. Beacon Pictures (Thirteen Days, Firewall) has attached Kerry to direct her first feature, an adaptation of Jessica Shattuck’s novel The Hazards of Good Breeding, about a blue-blood Massachusetts family. Kerry says she was “looking for a Wasp story” to direct and fell hard for Hazards. “I related to a lot of the characters in it, although they tend to be a little bit more dysfunctional than the ones I know.” The novel follows a young woman whose family is in turmoil: Her mother has a nervous breakdown, and her father impregnates the babysitter. “I wouldn’t say that it’s a portrait of my family,” she adds. Beacon’s Peter Almond says he’ll begin shopping the project to studios next week, noting, “Some very fine actors and their representatives have expressed interest.”

[TayTay]

1. Sounds like a good project.

It also sounds like a good fit for this talented lady. I would venture that she can bring some insight into those characters that another director might not have.

I love that she has to have the disclaimer.

[emulatorloo]

2. Amazon page on the novel w summary -- sounds like it will make a good movie

http://www.amazon.com/Hazards-Good-Breeding-Novel/dp/0393324834

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From Publishers Weekly
Shattuck's debut novel is a social comedy, with flashes of darker import, about an upper-crust Boston suburban family forced to come to terms with the pressures of contemporary life and the ways in which they succeed, or more frequently fail. Patriarch Jack Dunlap is a rigid, seemingly puritanical businessman whose stern eccentricities have driven his wife, Faith, out of the house and into a state of nervous exhaustion. Daughter Caroline, made of sterner stuff, is trying to get used to the family weirdness again after graduating from college and returning home to decide what to do with her life-which will probably not include continuing to see an old beau, pot-smoking Rock. Her little brother, Eliot, is attempting to come to terms with the loss of his beloved Colombian babysitter, Rosita, fired under mysterious circumstances. It is Rosita, a symbol of strength and resilience amid the flaky denizens of her adopted country, who becomes the center around which the anxieties and obsessions of the principals revolve, and she is perhaps too easy a symbol. Shattuck is an observant and graceful writer, and contrives some elegant and touching scenes, particularly as Faith begins to recover a sense of her womanhood with a charming French visitor. But the book, for all its virtues, feels excessively schematic, and various plot strands-like Caroline's involvement with a documentary filmmaker-are dropped too summarily. Blurbs compare it to the work of Richard Yates and John Cheever, but it has neither the somber anguish of the former or the comic, off-center elan of the latter.

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