It took about a decade for Simon Beaufoy to find himself back in the winner’s circle again – Slumdog accolades in writing keep coming his way, but this latest hiring might have more to do with his understanding for his own backyard. THR reports that Beaufoy will work from an earlier draft by Harry Elfont and Deb Kaplan for Leap Year – a rom com that Spyglass is looking to put into production sometime this year.
Beaufoy wrote the screenplay for Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – also an Amy Adams starrer. Here she would play an uptight woman who travels to Dublin to propose to her boyfriend on leap day, Feb. 29, following an Irish tradition in which women propose to men on that day and the man must say yes. When weather derails her trip, she enlists the help of a surly Irish innkeeper to make an unexpected cross-country trek to pull off the perfect proposal in time.
Here is more on the tradition. The right of every women to propose on 29th February each leap year, goes back many hundreds of years to when the leap year day had no recognition in English law (the day was ‘lept over’ and ignored, hence the term ‘leap year’).
It was considered, therefore, that as the day had no legal status, it was reasonable to assume that traditions also had no status.
Consequently, women who were concerned about being ‘left on the shelf’ took advantage of this anomaly and proposed to the man they wished to marry.
It was also thought that since the leap year day corrected the discrepancy between the calendar year of 365 days and the time taken for the Earth to complete one orbit of the sun (365 days and 6 hours), it was an opportunity for women to correct a tradition that was one-sided and unjust.