The Devil's Pleasure Garden

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Attorney Marc Jacobson
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Pretentious Pictures Presents:

CHOCOLATE AND CHAMPAGNE

A comedy with a dark center

A Beverly Hills woman wakes up "older" and finds her life with a younger man undignified. The stage version was produced in at the Creative Place Theatre in NYC.

Attached: Bo Derek

Diana, the Hamlet at the heart of this comedy, is a clothes designer with a boutique on Rodeo Drive, a house in Beverly Hills, and a younger lover, Jim, her kept man for two years now. There’s nothing she can’t handle—except getting older.

She deals with a birthday by throwing him out. They're right for each other, she regrets it immediately, but she can't take him back, because her daughter Jackie, who idolizes and competes with her, tells her Jim has seduced her, and Diana believes it.

Proposed: James Woods

So she makes do with the respectable but empty life she'd thought she needed, with her lawyer Griff—more her age, and on her success level. Griff has been in love with her for years. Now’s his chance.

Proposed: Gael García Bernal

Jim is happy with a champagne-and-sports-car life, but he’s also a talented script-writer who’s postponing seriousness into a future that never comes. Together they’re fast company. They must have been brilliant at her birthday party last night.

This morning, though, even while he’s making love to her, she’s spooked. She tells him he has to go. She wants something more presentable, more—respectable—before it’s too late. Which shocks him. He takes life as it comes, but this is a bit violent.

Proposed: Jennifer Coolidge

Betsy, the suicidal widow of a husband she drove to suicide, is too scattered to pass a driving test, takes a lesson with Jim, spins the car onto a Mulholland Drive cliff and is ready to gun it and take him with her. He calms her down and she takes him home. But he can't forget Diana.

Proposed: Adelaide Clemens

Jackie, Diana’s daughter, idolizes her and so misses no chance to pick at and defy her. Inwardly shaky, she is outwardly impish and sexy. She thinks she’s in love with Jim; in fact what she needs is a father.

Proposed: Owen Teague

Betsy's son Dylan—eccentric hair, psychotic eyes, twitches constantly and rhythmically as if keeping time to music he doesn’t much enjoy—is in the same class at UCLA with Jackie, over whom he moans uncontrollably. He disgusts her.

Proposed: Rosie Perez

Maria, Diana's housekeeper, is the deadpan foil to Diana's Hamlet, secret ally to Jim, and the one person Diana doesn't dare defy.

Proposed: Amy Brenneman

GWEN is Diana's mischievous best friend and alter-ego. She'll take Jim if Diana doesn't want him! Just kidding. In an attempt to bring them back together she throws a party and invites both of them, but it turns into a confrontation....

And the final character is Beverly Hills—the tone, the climate, the village size and ambiance that make it inevitable for these people to collide.

Pretentious pictures presents

a comedy with a dark center.

Kiss of Death

A romantic thriller about a boy with a fatal kiss, and the women who need it.

A young man whose kiss kills doesn't dare have sex—until he starts sleeping with terminal patients who need a way out. But he can't have the woman he loves.

In English for the world market. Set in Athens—

—it begins on Hydra:

When middle-aged Otto brings his twenty-year-old mistress Anita to an island she betrays him in the woods with a mule-driver, while Otto climbs toward a monastery and dies of a heart attack.

(Click on a name for a résumé, and on a picture for a show reel:)

Despina Mirou (Anita)

After dark she finds the body, and he comes briefly back to life and forces her to have sex—or was it a dream? "Oh, Otto, I hope you didn’t make me pregnant! What would come out?"

Albert de Jongh (Felix)

What comes out is Felix. When he kisses someone, she dies. That's how it happens when he's a kid. The islanders think he has the evil eye, and run them out.

At high school in Athens he doesn't dare kiss Dorothy, the girl he's in love with, which is not something she can accept or understand.

Fiona Georgiadi (Dorothy)

His mother Anita can't understand or accept it either, and urges him to get a girl. So he gets a girl—and she dies in his arms.

Mule driver Manolis seduces Anita, or she seduces him, and he assumes that Felix is his son. What else could he be? He doesn’t know why Felix should have the evil eye, but he believes it.

Michalis Anthis (Manolis)

Felix is a bright student at the American College, and a successful young financial adviser, but without Dorothy, without any love life, he's suicidal. And temptation is all around him.

Petroula Christou (Elie)

Elie, a receptionist at the brokerage where Felix works, is determined to seduce him and, oh, is she hard to resist!

Then he meets a terminal patient who wants out—and helps her out—and has his first sex with another human being.

Themis Bazaka

Now he has found his niche: financial advisor by day, mercy seducer by night:

Sophie Papadopoulos

Rea Karayanidou

His psychiatrist doesn't believe it, and puts it to the test: Pepi Moschovakou

Even his high school teacher needs out: MariaCristina Heller.

And the police are taking an interest, but what can they prove?

Tom Malloy (Inspector Liatis)

Only with Bald Woman does Felix decline to follow through.

Louiza Zouzias (Bald Woman)

Motorcycle tough, she has made her chemo baldness part of her butch style, and falls for Felix. He evades her because she’s too full of life to kill, but in pursuit of the kiss of death she finds him and wreaks havoc on his day job—not to say on his chaste relationship with Dorothy. Like Tristan and Isolde, they sleep with a sword between them.

His mother Anita watches in pain while he lives out Otto's curse, agonizes over the career of dangerous judgements he's embarked on, and does what she can to interfere.

When she sees how in love and how frustrated he and Dorothy are, she knows she has to do something.

Duncan Skinner (Otto)

Otto, like Hamlet’s father, is a vengeful ghost. His son can’t have sex without inflicting death, and Otto sees to it that Anita will pay that price.

Pretentious Pictures presents a romantic thriller.

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Pretentious Pictures Presents:

Kiss of Death