Films Not Made

Dan Mirvish, co-founder of Slamdance, comes on to talk about the unmade film that haunted him for years. Stamp & Deliver was a darkly comic postal western — think No Country for Old Men meets Office Space — and it got closer than most. Sets were built in Austin. Brittany Murphy auditioned. Ed Asner and Peter Fonda were in. Neil Young was going to produce and score it. Then 9/11 happened.

We go through the whole story, run the original script through our AI pipeline, and give Stamp & Deliver the trailer it never got and still deserves. Our film executive Meredith also stops by with notes — and sounds exactly like every development meeting you've ever sat through.

If you love indie film, hollywood stories, development hell, and the ones that got away — this one's for you.

https://linktr.ee/atomicfondue
https://substack.com/@danmirvish
https://www.danmirvish.com/Stamp-Deliver
next film, Atomic Fondue (still raising money!)
https://www.danmirvish.com/Atomic-Fondue"

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It's been over 25 years since Matthew Rhys first read the script of The Amateur Pornographer. This project broke the heart of writer-director Christopher Monger.

In this special Backlot episode, actor Matthew Rhys, along with Ian McNiece and Meryn Williams Davies, share and read two scenes from the original screenplay. Chris and producer Ted Hope are in the room, reinvigorating the passion behind the script and desire to bring this Welsh film to life.

Christopher said, "Seeing Matthew Rhys and Ian McNeice and Meryn Williams Davies read a couple of scenes made me both happy and sad.  Happy in that, yes, I think it is a good script; and sad because, no, it did not get made. When I re-read Amateur Pornographer I was filled with the excitement I had when writing it."

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Christopher Monger, a Welsh native, was fresh off the Miramax release of his film The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain starring Hugh Grant. His next project was to shoot in a small town in Wales, and producer Ted Hope felt it was a sure thing. The Amateur Pornographer was nearly made with a young Matthew Rhys and later got traction at HBO, with one note: Could the film be set in the United States instead of Wales?

Christopher Monger IMDB
Ted Hope’s Substack “Hope for Film”
Check out our curated Letterboxd List for some New York mid 90s indie classics to go with our Ted Hope-Good Machine vibe.
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In 2007, producer Effie Brown and novelist Nichol Bradford put together a 40-page pitch deck for The Sisterhood — a global conspiracy thriller about a secret network of women of color who build an alternative system of wealth, protection, and care, and get targeted for it. The deck built an entire world around the project — a transmedia universe of community, content, and activism — before that phrase existed.

Hollywood still said no.

In this episode of Films Not Made, Effie Brown (producer of Dear White People and Real Women Have Curves, CEO of Gamechanger Films, Academy Board of Governors) and Nichol Bradford (author, technologist, Singularity University faculty, Executive in Residence for AI and the Future of Work at SHRM) join Amy and Avi to finally open the drawer on The Sisterhood — a project that hasn't been pitched in over a decade and somehow feels more urgent right now than ever.

Effie's pitch: "Bourne Ultimatum meets House of Cards — but with sisters." A vaccine that could collapse the global drug economy. A murder. A reckoning. And the question underneath all of it: who actually runs the world, and what happens when someone tries to build outside the system?

We run the full project through our AI pipeline: pitch deck, casting board (Angela Bassett, Danielle Deadwyler, Regina King, Lashana Lynch, Mads Mikkelsen with a satellite phone in a museum), a full trailer — and a live pitch to our AI film executive, who has opinions.

Effie's verdict on whether this could be made now: 1,000%.

Guests:
Effie Brown Gamechanger Films
Nichol Bradford

Films Not Made resurrects Hollywood's wildest unmade films.

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Oscar-nominated filmmaker Heidi Ewing (Jesus Camp, Detropia) joins Amy and Avi to open the drawer on How to Tame a Fox — her shelved script about two Soviet biologists who secretly tried to domesticate wild foxes in Siberia while Stalin was busy persecuting anyone who liked science.

Based on the true story of Lyudmila Trut and Dmitri Belyaev, this is a Cold War thriller disguised as an animal story — or an animal story disguised as a Cold War thriller, depending on how you feel about foxes that eventually sing.

Heidi wrote a full pilot during COVID, had a dream cast (Daniel Day-Lewis, Cate Blanchett, Joaquin Phoenix), and then Putin invaded Ukraine and tanked the mood for celebrating Russian scientists. Timing is everything.

We fed the script into our AI pipeline, generated a new pitch deck and trailer, and let our AI executive Finn weigh in. Heidi's verdict: still a f***ing good idea. We agree.

Some projects don't die. They just wait.

Loki Films: https://lokifilms.com
Heidi Ewing on Instagram

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