Universal haven’t abandoned ship on Richard Curtis‘ sophomore feature, instead they’re getting James Schamus and Focus Features to tugboat The Boat That Rocked for a more strategic North American release. Variety reports that Focus plans to do a little bit of trimming, and obviously the late August date has been pushed back to a November release, a little after Coen’s A Serious Man and perhaps stuck too close to the eventual releases of Biutiful and Greenburg.
Set in Britain during 1966 in an era when the BBC, the only UK mainland licensed radio broadcaster (Manx Radio had already been licensed to serve the Isle of Man), played little more than two hours of any kind of recorded music each week. In the story a pirate station called Radio Rock began broadcasting rock music twenty-four hours a day from a boat anchored off the coast of England in international waters. Hosted by a colourful band of disc-jockeys, it soon gains an audience of millions and angers the government in the process. While the story does have some relationship to real events it does not represent any specific station that was broadcasting to Britain in 1966. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rhys Ifans and Nick Frost play rival DJs, with Bill Nighy as their boss and Kenneth Branagh as the government minister trying to shut them down.
A prolific comedy writer, Curtis’ directorial debut was the ensemble pic Love Actually.
