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Andy Garcia: The Lost City
Garcia's
Cuban drama "City" set for spring release
By Gregg Goldstein
http://channels.netscape.com/news/
NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter)
- Indie distributor Magnolia Pictures has acquired North American rights
to Andy Garcia's directorial
debut, "The Lost City," which is set during the Cuban Revolution
of 1958-59, the company said Wednesday.
A platformed theatrical release for the film, in which Garcia co-stars with Bill Murray and Dustin Hoffman, is planned for the spring.
"It's a culmination of Andy Garcia's long-standing commitment to preserving Cuban music and culture," said Bill Banowsky, CEO of Magnolia Pictures and its corporate sibling, Landmark Theatres.
Garcia produced, scored and
led an ensemble of predominantly Cuban-American actors in the tumultuous
family saga. He plays a Cuban nightclub owner caught up in a love affair
with the wife of his younger brother (Ines Sastre, Nestor Carbonell, respectively).
Hoffman plays notorious nightclub gangster Meyer Lansky, and Murray plays
an American expatriate in Havana whom Garcia describes as "a combination
of Groucho Marx and Jiminy Cricket, commenting on the absurdities in my
character's life."
Prepped in six weeks and shot in 35 days in the Dominican Republic two summers ago, the film, Garcia said, "was delivered at under its $9.5 million budget. It took 16 years to finance and 18 years to distribute, but it began subconsciously when I left Cuba in 1961, and it's infused all aspects of my life since then."
In 1990, he traveled to London to meet a favorite exiled Cuban novelist, G. Cabrera Infante, who drafted the 300-page first draft of the screenplay, which eventually became the two-hour, 20-minute film, in which Garcia said "the music is a character taking you through."
When all traditional funding sources failed to materialize, Garcia took it to independent financiers Tom Gores and Johnny Lopez to get it off the ground. "If you're interested long enough, someone throws you a rope and you just hope you don't hang yourself with it," he joked. Infante was able to see a rough cut before dying this year.
Magnolia, part of billionaire Mark Cuban's 2929 Entertainment banner, is prepping for the award-qualifying release of the Anthony Hopkins vehicle "The World's Fastest Indian" in New York and Los Angeles on Dec. 9.
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
11/17/05 02:18
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