Project status September 15, 2011

Summer is one of Edith Wharton’s most original and successful works. It has been adapted for television, theatre, and opera, but never for film. Plans to produce Summer as a feature in the 1930s fell apart because the material was seen as “too immoral”, although Wharton herself saw how the visual and dramatic elements in Summer would lend themselves to film.

An overlooked classic by one of the great American novelists, Summer has instant appeal to the overlooked audience which recently pushed The Help, The King’s Speech, and Atonement to the top of the box office.

Carl Sprague, film designer and veteran of several Wharton screen and theatre adaptations (The Buccaneers, The Age of Innocence) was inspired to adapt Summer as a movie while preparing an exhibit for The Mount – Wharton’s estate in Lenox, Massachusetts. The screenplay attracted immediate interest. Over $100,000 in development funding has been raised. Preliminary cast lists, schedule and budget have been prepared. Principal photography is planned for eight weeks starting in Spring 2012. A majority of locations have already been identified.

Summer is told entirely from the point of view of its young lead – Charity Royall. The novel’s structure and subject matter are unique: a bitter May-September compromise brackets an explosive summer romance. These are great roles which will attract great actors.

A wealth of talent and production value is available in Massachusetts. The production concept is to create maximum visual impact with minimal physical expenditure. The aim in producing Summer is to show a new way forward for the adaptation of American classics.

Here’s Wharton writing to her friend Gaillard Lapsley in the darkest days of the First World War, Paris, December 21, 1916:

“I have written a book in the last six months – a shortish novel […} known to its author and her familiars as the Hot Ethan, the scene being laid in the neighborhood of Windsor Mountain, and the time being Summer, which is also the title of the book. There’s a Fourth of July at Pittsfield that few people but you and I are capable of appreciating! I don’t know how on earth the thing got itself written in the scramble and scuffle of my present life, but it did, and I think you’ll like it.”