I guess it was just a matter of time (about a month) when the The Hollywood Reporter who found the drip from the leaky faucet would go-ahead and confirm that Bob Berney is indeed coming back in the game and that he made his first move in a preemptive type of manner. Set to have its world premiere this coming Friday (I’ll be at the 8:30 a.m. press screening), Bright Star becomes the first title in the Bill Pohlad and Bob Berney’s the soon to be named distribution venture. Does this mean that Terrence Malick’s next has already found a home as well?
Set in London 1818, this is about a secret love affair begins between 23 year old English poet, John
Keats, and the girl next door, Fanny Brawne, an outspoken student of fashion.
This unlikely pair started at odds; he thinking her a stylish minx, she unimpressed by
literature in general.
It was the illness of Keats’s younger brother that drew them together. Keats was
touched by Fanny’s efforts to help and agreed to teach her poetry.
By the time Fanny’s alarmed mother and Keats’s best friend Brown realised their
attachment, the relationship had an unstoppable momentum. Intensely and
helplessly absorbed in each other, the young lovers were swept into powerful new
sensations, “I have the feeling as if I were dissolving”, Keats wrote to her. Together
they rode a wave of romantic obsession that deepened as their troubles mounted.
Only Keats’s illness proved insurmountable.
