Posted on 03/22/2008 10:46:47 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
When Leonardo DiCaprio was a young boy, he used to play hide-and-seek in the overgrown gardens of a Hollywood Hills mansion owned by the family of the visionary British author Aldous Huxley.
Now, 30 years later, the star of Titanic and The Aviator is paying back the hospitality by putting his Hollywood muscle behind the first big-screen production of Brave New World, Huxley’s most enduring novel.
The Universal Studios movie, which Sir Ridley Scott wants to direct, has become possible only because years of wrangling over the terms of Huxley’s will have finally been settled, his granddaughter Tessa confirmed last week. “There is now nothing stopping this film,” she said.
America, which claims the Surrey-born author as one of its own, appears to be on the brink of a Huxley revival.
Fresh editions of his novels are in the works, Californian libraries are bidding for his papers, which include a hoard of unpublished manuscripts, and his last home above Los Angeles — where DiCaprio played — may be turned into a writers’ retreat.
Yet Huxley was a quintessential middle-class Englishman. Born in Godalming and educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, he became a friend of 1920s luminaries such as DH Lawrence and the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Both men influenced Huxley’s portrait of a future London where sex is easy but love banned in Brave New World, which was published in 1932.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1937, saying the light suited his poor eyesight. Hollywood employed him to rewrite British classics for the screen such as Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. His rambling home on Mulholland Drive, the highway that winds along the top of the mountains overlooking Los Angeles, became a salon for intellectuals from the astronomer Edwin Hubble to the Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, promoter of the hallucinogenic drug LSD, which Huxley took as part of a final ceremony as he lay stricken with cancer in 1963.
Until her own death at 96 last December, Huxley’s Italian-born widow Laura maintained the Mulholland home as an open house where she became friends with George DiCaprio, the actor’s artist father.
“Laura and I were friends, and Leo was friends with Laura’s ward Karen: they were toddlers playing together in these rambling old gardens with an empty fish pond and wild flowers everywhere,” DiCaprio, 64, recalled last week.
“Laura always wanted a film made of Brave New World, but the technology was not there to make it look convincing. It is a vast futuristic world to put on screen, packed with many ideas which made it tough for some studios to deal with. And there were also family issues,” he said.
These issues hinged on the terms of Huxley’s will. It left 80% of future royalties to Laura and 20% to his son Matthew by his first wife Maria, which on Matthew’s death passed to his two children Trevenen and Tessa.
They expressed what family friends call “disappointment” with this arrangement, and made it clear they enjoyed “termination” rights, which meant they could stop any film. Studios were not willing to risk that.
The Huxleys’ literary agent, Georges Borchardt, who also represents Ian McEwan and the Tennessee Williams estate, has negotiated a fresh, undisclosed royalty deal with the younger Huxleys, which has cleared the way for the movie.
DiCaprio will play John the Savage, who lives a “natural” life on a reservation while the rest of cloned humanity is lulled into docility with sex, soma (drugs) and feelies (films that also involve the senses of smell and touch). He finally escapes celebrity to become a lighthouse keeper.
“And Ridley Scott, who has just finished working with Leo on a film called Body of Lies, has volunteered himself to direct,” said George DiCaprio, who is helping to produce Brave New World. “We are due to see the first script next week.”
Tessa Huxley, 54, said last week that she remembered playing as a small child with her grandfather in the house on Mulholland. She added: “I know my grandfather would be very pleased that his ideas were about to reach a new audience around the world.”
Hollywood proclaims the “Red Scare” a myth yet they understand that 1984 and Animal Farm are warnings. Too bad the Red Dupes are such useful idiots that they think it can ever apply to rightwing extremism.
They were an indictment of the Stalinists in the US and UK who absolutely refused to criticize Stalin or the USSR even though they had no problems with trashing the West even during WWII.
As they said in Seinfeld, "not that there's anything wrong with that!" ;-)
But I think you've got the story wrong. Link
This and 1984 are very prophetic books.
My doctor informs me there is a drug called “Soma”, though it’s not in my pill book. He said it’s very powerful.
Here’s Google’s Soma finds: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Soma&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
To the Leftists in Hollywood, the novel probably seems Utopian.
Either that, or they’ll turn it into a condemnation of the Bu$HitlerCo administration.
> “DiCaprio will play John the Savage, ...
He’d do better playing the shrimpy, craven Bernard Marx.
But, will they cast Geraldo Rivera as Primo Mellon?
with DiCaprio in this crapper....it will do as well as the great film of the century......gigli!!!!!!
This might be an interesting movie. I mean maybe some people will finally decide that we don’t want America to end up like that.
Seems a weak choice for a big-budget film.
Are you serious? The number one ticket seller of all times with the highest money makes of all times even 10 years later. You need a serious marketing course ASAP!!! I suppose you are thinking that Rick Shroeder should play the part??? Just because he is conservative does not mean he will sell tickets. Leo a liberal has proved himself. Rick Shroeder has a TV show Silver Spoons under his belt. lol.
Soma is an orthopedic muscle relaxant, now long generic.
It is true that it is prophetic (correct and incorrect predictions), but Brave New World is boring.
If they do a good job, I will and so will my family. BNW is part of my children’s reading list on government. All of them learned a lot from the book, which by the way, is mentioned in Goldberg’s latest book on fascism.
Shut up and take the soma; I’m glad I’m a beta.and there it is...
If Ridley Scott directs “Brave New World”, that would be big news indeed. If done properly, this could make quite a movie.
There have been worse books chosen for movies...”Naked Lunch” comes to mind...
Is this the story where he ends up in Mexico and is saved by his Mother who has been living as a native for quite a while? This may be the spin as the natives are the smart ones.
I’m certain I saw a version of this on TV a couple of years ago, maybe on the Sci-Fi channel. Leonard Nimoy was the top bad guy.
Well, I had a few sources that were on the set of Don’s Plum that said to the contrary.
Let’s just say they had a very close relationship.
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