JIMMY

Screenplay by Roshan Sethi & Hayley Schore
To be directed by Elika Portnoy

JIMMY tells the story of Dr. Sidney Farber — an intense, obsessive-compulsive pathologist at the Children’s Hospital of Boston who suffers from the disdain of fellow faculty members and the rampant anti-semitism at Harvard Medical School. Farber has the unimaginably grim job of performing autopsies on children who have died from cancer. Most of them had leukemia. All of them died. Farber befriends an Indian janitor in the hospital — whose doctorate in biology did not transfer to the United States — and together they contemplate the insane idea of chemically poisoning children to cure their cancer. Farber faces resistance from parents, and colleagues. But eventually he enrolls his first patient, an impish, charming boy named JIMMY. Incredibly, the treatment — which they call Chemotherapy — works. Farber enrolls more patients and just as the victory begins to feel too good to be true — it stops working. The leukemia, held at bay for weeks, returns. Farber watches as the children begin to relapse and die, one by one. Except for Jimmy, whose parents take him away.

We follow Farber over years as he eventually finds the solution in a cocktail of drugs, curing the first cohort of children with leukemia. But he never tracks down Jimmy. The movie ends in 1998 when a 62 year old truck driver walks into the lobby of Dana-Farber, goes up to the receptionist and says, “Hi, I’m Jimmy. I heard you were looking for me.”  This actually happened almost 20 years ago. It turns out, Jimmy did survive. He returned to Maine, where he lived with his parents — both potato farmers who kept thinking his cancer would come back. It didn’t. He married, raised a family, had grandchildren. Generations that almost never existed were it not for Sidney Farber.

FOX IN THE WOLF’S LAIR

Screenplay by Bob Eisele

King Boris of Bulgaria, traumatized by combat in World War One – and robbed of his self-confidence by his royal father – faces a dilemma at the dawn of World War Two. Should he ally himself with Hitler, or resist and risk Bulgaria’s destruction? Boris avoids allying his country with the Nazis through acts of cunning, cleverness and diplomacy. But to save Bulgaria’s soldiers from dying on the battlefield, the king must ultimately join Hitler’s alliance. As fascism seeps into Bulgarian life, Boris plays a metaphoric “chess game” with the Führer to protect the Jews as the Nazi death machinery is put into motion. At the eleventh hour, Boris – the wily fox who’s held Hitler at bay – must decide to take a stand that threatens his life and the lives of his family, or watch his Jewish subjects journey to their deaths. When Boris finally confronts the Führer in a Nazi command bunker called “the Wolf’s Lair,” the destinies of 50,000 souls hang in the balance...of World War Two’s greatest untold story. 

NUMBERS AND WORDS

Screenplay by Grace Sherman

Logline: A young black math prodigy’s life is thrown into disarray after a terrible accident sends him to prison. 

Grace Sherman’s 2018 Nicholl Fellowship award winning Numbers & Words is a wrenching drama that grapples with African-American masculinity, womanhood and the prison industrial complex, among a myriad of other topics and issues relevant to the African-American experience. Sherman’s script finds its dramatic power in its deeply intimate study of its characters, producing a story that is at once timely and timeless, complex yet lucid; bleak, but overall brimming with love and hope.   

THE LIGHTS

Screenplay by Chris Rossi
To be directed by Faraday Okoro

THE LIGHTS comes at a time when artists and audiences alike are hungry for stories that address issues of racism, classism and the complicated relationships born from our city’s diversity in a Trump-era Los Angeles. Stories that bring us together and fight the rising tides of division.

Ours tells the story of five, diverse Los Angelenos whose lives intersect as they each choose to confront a haunting mistake from their past. Their road to atonement leads them to corners of Los Angeles not often seen, where they discover that redemption may not always come from forgiveness, but from the simple act of trying. Black, White, Latino… Rich, Poor, Homeless… Our characters introduce us to the Los Angeles that we don’t often see in film about people coming together from all walks of life... At a time when many are seeing to alienate and divide.

WONDERLAND HEIGHTS

TV-series written by Mike Harden and Elika Portnoy

Synopsis: Wonderland Heights is a mini-series composed of six stand-alone stories, each episode following a different tenant living in The Wonderland Heights apartment building. While the characters and stories may occasionally intersect, each episode will focus solely one particular apartment and its occupants, as they each struggle with one of the more hot-button social issues of our day, specifically involving those living on the economic fringes of society such as they are. 

YESTERDAY

Based on the novel by Felicia Yap
Screenplay by Justin Lader

YESTERDAY blends  the existential sci-fi of BLADE RUNNER, the multi-layered noir of CHINATOWN and the slipperiness of memory depicted in MEMENTO to produce a narrative all its own. It mines the device of the “unreliable narrator” found in all of those films for its full dramatic potential, producing a fresh meditation on the cross section of identity, memory, and technology, in a thrilling, edge-of-your-seat, detective story.   

YOLO FOREVER

Screenplay by Theresa Bennett and Dan Marshall
To be directed by Theresa Bennett

Synopsis: Brie and Finn are at two spectrums of life and death—Brie is immortal and has been 16 for 327 years; Finn is 16 and in the final stages of terminal cancer. When the two form a friendship and Brie is forced to go on the run again, the pair embark on a cross country road trip to try and save Finn’s life and end Brie’s torturous immortality; but will love cause them to make decisions that they weren’t prepared for?