The Devil's Pleasure Garden: Pretentious Pictures Presents:

Pretentious Pictures Presents:

Casanova, Come Back!

The modern Casanova longs to settle down with one woman, but she resists him.

He’s coming to Oxbridge to give a poetry reading and speak to a few classes…

…and the girls are sort of interested!

The great lover's great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson—

(You didn’t know he was secretly married? It happened in England—a nun who had already taken her vows, the Mother Superior outraged, powerful people to please…)

—has the same name, the same weakness for women (and they for him, or at least for his reputation), sports the same drag and is a so-so poet on the campus circuit.

How can he get steady work as a teacher when trouble dogs him everywhere! No one takes him seriously except as a—Except as a—

So when he arrives in Oxbridge he announces that he’s impotent.

Ah, but he’s played here before, and now his past rises up to confront him.

Proposed cast: we don't have our Casanova yet.

GIACOMO CASANOVA (“Just make it Jack”) takes advantage of his ancestor’s reputation to spice up his act as a performing poet with eighteenth-century costume, and it works on the ladies. But what he needs is a steady job, and a life.

Proposed cast: Anna Friel (Henrietta)

He doesn’t remember her but some years earlier he had played Oxbridge and it had worked on HENRIETTA PASTORLY, now a lecturer here with a young son who speaks a private language—one that only Casanova can speak with him. Could it be…

Proposed cast: Donald Sutherland (the ghost)

The GHOST of the original Casanova haunts his great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson, criticizes his choices and kibitzes the action. No one else can see him and sometimes Casanova almost thinks he’s real.

Proposed cast: Emma Thompson (Deborah)

Chairwoman DEBORAH BLAKE, the no-nonsense head of the Oxbridge English Department, can’t help but be intrigued by Casanova’s reputation. Or is it excited? Or is it, as her husband suspects, in love?

Proposed cast: Brenda Blethyn (Cissy)

LADY CISSY SNABE, a benefactress of the University, falls from a dangerous height into Casanova’s gallant arms, much to everyone’s relief. She’s beyond suspicion in such matters, but who is that mysterious visitor at her bedroom window?

Proposed cast: Tom Wilkinson (Rafe)

DEAN RAFE HARWICK’s wife and underage daughter are both in erotic trances over the arrival on campus of Casanova–and so, it turns out, is the Dean!

Attached:

And the seventh character is Oxford. Or rather Cambridge. Let’s call it Oxbridge, as so many do. Hell for some; heaven for others—like Jack, who could live happily ever after here as a simple lecturer.