Page updated 11/5/99

Londonium

Film Facts
Plot Summary
General Comments
Trivia

As this film project is not even completed, what you will find here is information from the production company.  I would like to thank Karen for kindly sharing her Londonium material with the Roles Pages. More information and pictures will be added as they become available.
Photos courtesy of Karen and the Spring.


Film Facts


Colin’s Character:  Allen Portland
Other Cast:  Mike Binder (Ben Green),  Mariel Hemingway (Carly Matthews-Portland), Irene Jacob (Fiona Delgrazio), Stephen Fry, 
Jack Dee, Steven Markus, and Christopher Lawford.
Directed by:  Mike Binder
Producer:  Jack Binder
Screenplay:  Mike Binder
Director of Photography:  Sue Gibson
Editor:  Chris Baird
Production Designer:  Martyn John
Release Date:  Fall 2000
Genre:  Romantic comedy

 

Plot Summary


A contemporary comedy about love, marriage, commitment and sex.  The storyline revolves around Ben Green (Mike Binder), an American sitcom writer who is hired to invigorate a British hit television show.  He becomes hopelessly obsessed by the program’s star, Carly (Mariel Hemingway).Carly is a charismatic and self-absorbed American actress whose faded Hollywood career has been rejuvenated by her highly successful English comedy series.  She is married to Allen (Colin), a very proper London-born producer whose frustration drives him to the local pub.

Irene Jacob appears as Fiona, Carly’s French make-up artist with literary aspirations who becomes romantically linked with Ben.

Stephen Fry plays an uptight psychiatrist who has handled a number of labor relations cases for Allen.
 
 

General Comments


The first rough cut of Londinium was screened October 21 by a select few.  The movie was pronounced very good.  Running a bit too long, it will undergo some fine tuning and trimming.

Colin’s performance was deemed “absolutely magnificent” and “subtle and nuanced.”  In the role of Allen, a very cultured and thoughtful character, Colin is simultaneously “strong and acerbic and yet undergoes a tender transformation that is thoroughly believable. He also looks every inch a matinee idol.”

Allen is not keen on his wife's insistence on seeing a psychiatrist to discuss their flagging sex life, so he recommends Stephen Fry, who is wonderfully and hilariously uncomfortable discussing the topic of-- s-e-x.  The scenes are few, but choice, and the two play very well off each other.
 
 

Trivia


· Irene Jacob also starred with Colin in My Life So Far.

· Filmed entirely in and around London, the movie features such locations as the Serpentine waterway in Hyde Park, the South Bank arts complex overlooking the Thames, Regent’s Park, Waterloo Station and the British Museum.  But, according to Binder’s interview in the LA Times, his enthusiasm for filming on location was only moderately marred by a few complaints:  “There’s the traffic.  One minute it’s sunny, one minute it’s cloudy, so nothing matches.  There’s always planes overhead.  One day 50,000 Kurdish demonstrators are marching and half the city’s blocked off.  We encountered the world’s largest gay [pride] parade.  The day we shot at the South Bank, a guy jumps off Waterloo Bridge and commits suicide, so the place is swarming with helicopters and boats and we can’t shoot.”
 
 

 
 

After the finished version is screened for the distributors will distribution plans be finalized. The producers also believe the film should be released in the fall and have targeted the Toronto Film Festival, as a possible launch pad.
Selection process for the TFF will begin March/April 2000.

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