BBC Radio 4 will present Orson Welles’ unfilmed Heart of Darkness, along with unproduced projects by Alfred Hitchcock and Arthur Miller this month.
Radio 4 announced in June that its Unmade Movies – a series which launched in February this year and brought together a collection of unproduced screenplays from globally celebrated writers – was making a return with Arthur Miller’s unproduced screenplay The Hook.
Today, it announced that the series will also feature world premieres of Heart Of Darkness by Orson Welles, and The Blind Man by Alfred Hitchcock and Ernest Lehman – all sitting in the station’s drama slot on Saturday afternoon at 2.30 p.m. across three weekends in October.
“To discover an unmade screenplay of the calibre of any of these is a find in itself, but to unearth three is little short of a miracle,” said Jeremy Howe, Drama Commissioner for BBC Radio 4. “I hope our audience will agree that being offered these three masterpieces on consecutive Saturdays is a massive treat. Get yourself a long drink, a bucket of popcorn, and sit back and enjoy the cream of Hollywood in its heyday – three brand spanking new stories from Arthur Miller, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles.”
Arthur Miller’s The Hook will see Adrian Noble take on his first directorship in radio drama and David Suchet, Tim Pigott-Smith and Elliot Cowan all star. The unproduced screenplay tells the story of a 1950s Brooklyn longshoreman who is fired for standing up to his corrupt union boss, but decides to fight back.
Originally written by Orson Welles in 1939, with the intention of him directing and starring as both Marlow and Kurtz, the screenplay for Heart Of Darkness proved to be too audacious and grandiose for RKO Studios. Adapted from Joseph Conrad’s celebrated novel, it tells the story of a skipper who is hired to take a steam ship up the Congo River and encounters a terrifying evil. Forty years later it became the basis for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now! and now James McAvoy stars and Jamie Lloyd directs the world premiere of the original screenplay.
Alfred Hitchcock and Ernest Lehman’s The Blind Man, written shortly after the duo worked on North By Northwest, is set in 1961 and tells the story of a famous blind jazz pianist who agrees to an eye transplant. The operation is a success but the eyes are those of a murdered man and on them is transposed the image of his murderer. The BBC Radio 4 world premiere has been approved by Hitchcock’s three granddaughters with Hitchcock consultant Laurent Bouzereau, and it stars Hugh Laurie.
Listen to Unmade Movies on Oct. 17, 24 and 31 at 2.30 p.m. on BBC Radio 4 – or available to download after the broadcasts on the BBC iPlayer Radio app.
(Thanks to Phil Nichols for the heads up on this!)
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