If there’s anything I really like about covering indie films, it is that indie films are where you need to look if you want to keep pace with trends in original storytelling.
Picking up on where “Damages” left off in dealing with Ponzi scheme artists is screenwriter/producer R. Ellis Frazier who has assembled quite a cast for his feature directorial debut, The Exodus of Charlie Wright. Aidan Quinn will star, with Andy Garcia, Luke Goss, and Mario Van Peebles in supporting roles.
According to Jay A. Fernandez at The Hollywood Reporter, here’s the plot:
The story centers on Charlie (Quinn), a Los Angeles billionaire financial whiz who goes into self-imposed exile in Tijuana after his empire is revealed to have been a Ponzi scheme. While looking for the woman he abandoned there 25 years before, Charlie is pursued by a Mexican gangster (Garcia), a federal agent (Van Peebles) and thugs sent by a former client (Goss) looking to retrieve his money.
Whereas “Damages”—which I am still slogging through on DVR, so if you spoil it for me, I will gladly kill you—is very firmly empathetic towards Ponzi scheme victims, by having his protagonist be the schemer I’m wondering exactly just how Frazier will be able to make his story palatable enough for studio heads who may have lost money in Bernie Madoff’s scheme which was revealed in March 2009 and which victims included such Hollywood luminaries as Stephen Spielberg and his Wunderkinder Foundation, Dreamworks CEO Jeffery Katzenberg and Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick.
Perhaps the words “self-imposed exile” is key?
