In a Season of Soft Rains

Status: Script stage

Production company: Shadow Theatre Films / Recorded Picture Company

Cast: Chris McHallem (Flag, attached)

Crew: Richard Stanley (Screenwriter, attached as director), Eski Thomas (screenwriter), Jeremy Thomas (producer), Nick O'Hagan (producer (?))

Premise: In a near-future Great Britain, an American assassin codenamed Archangel is sent to eliminate the last remaining member of a royal family, who is leading an underground resistance against the goverment. Described as a Scifi-Thriller written by Stanley with Eski Thomas. Given Thomas' associations with Greenpeace, her job was most likely handling the environmental aspects (Global Warming) of the script.

Coverage: There was some coverage of Season in Starburst #268, published in November 2000. The film's planned to be shot completely on DV, which would significantly benefit the great number of night shots and visual effects. Test shooting on night vision was conducted. The proposed budjet is said to be $9 million.

"It seems the mysterious Mr. Stanley is hard at work trying to launch a script he wrote. Called In a Season of Soft Rains, it promises to be the ultimate Apocalyptic-English-Science-Fiction Thriller. The plot is set in a near-future England, which is mostly flooded due to Global Warming, and is now a fascist republic, where an assassin codenamed Archangel has been sent to assassinate the last surviving member of the royal family, who happens to be leading the underground resistence. The script is violent, crazy, and way cool. The kind that keeps throwing curveballs at you every ten pages, taking in cricket matches, mad drug trips, cynical politics and British mythology along the way, a combination of hard-core action and visionary transcendence.

The reason I'm telling you about it is, on October 22nd, there's going to be public reading of the screenplay at the October gallery in London, England, with tickets on sale to the public. The readers will be established actors, including the possibility of Jeremy Irons reading the stage directions. If that were the case, it would be awesome, because Stanley's directions are write in a style that feels like poetic prose. You might want to see if any of your spies might want to get to the reading and report back on the buzz on what promises to be one of the weirdest, coolest sci-fi scripts in years."
 
[Originally appeared in AICN, 10-09-1997]

"[Season]'s the big one, basically the end of the British Isles movie. An American assassin sent to Britain to kill the last surviving member of the Royal House of Windsor, who is a nine-year old boy doing a King Arthur thing and trying to stabilize the democratically re-elected goverment. It keeps floating in and out, keeps getting cast and then the cast falls apart. We get half the budjet and then have to start again. It keeps almost happening and it's been almost happening for quite a number of years. My line has been, unless they make the movie, they will be doomed to live it. It will all come true. Year by year it does get closer to reality. Air and sea pollution, acid rain, the British state of disorder. It's a large thing, producing a British scifi/action movie, and they keep stalling it."
 
[Richard Stanley in Sex & Guts Magazine #3, 2001]