How’s this for a true Hollywood story: During the recently completed 53rd Cannes Film Festival, producers were shooting a movie in Cannes about a series of murders that take place during the filming of a movie at Cannes.
The film, “Murder at the Cannes Film Festival,” is the second original movie filmed for E! Entertainment Television, best known for its news and features about the entertainment industry.
The mystery stars Bo Derek, French Stewart and Karina Lombard. While this year’s festival was underway, film crews for the movie were soaking up the glamour-filled event between takes.
The film is the brainchild of two veteran Hollywood marketing and public relations executives, Charlotte and Joel Parker, a husband-and-wife team that has attended the film festival in the past. During a middle-of-the-night chat, the Parkers had an epiphany about a fictional murder mystery set in Cannes, in which the killings happen on the set of a movie being filmed during the festival.
The couple wrote a treatment and made a deal with a longtime friend, veteran film producer David Michaels, who is currently producing a feature about the Marx Brothers for Danny DeVito’s Jersey Films. Michaels subsequently brought the project to Merv Griffin Entertainment, which sold the project to E!
“The setting for a murder mystery couldn’t be better,” said Charlotte Parker. “There’s glitz, glamour, money, movie stars and intrigue, all set on the picturesque Riviera.” The crew now moves to Vancouver, B.C., where the interiors will be shot.
Robert Kosberg, a producer for Merv Griffin Entertainment, said one of the keys to the sale was entertainment/hotel mogul Merv Griffin himself. The project was brought to him after he had returned from cruising the Riviera on his yacht during last year’s Cannes festival.
“Merv has a lot of relationships with talent (in the South of France), and also knows this world himself,” Kosberg said, adding that E! was the perfect choice for the project because it does lots of news and documentary coverage of the annual Cannes festival.
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So where is KFWB-AM 980’s morning-drive anchor Kathleen Sullivan, who left the all-news radio station April 27? “We don’t comment on our personnel,” said KFWB General Manager Roger Nadel.
The quirky Sullivan has done stints as an anchorwoman at CBS News, ABC and CNN. She joined KFWB last year and the ratings improved under her watch. Yet she hasn’t been heard for weeks, and there has been no on-air explanation of her departure.
RadioDigest.com, an online service about the radio industry, speculated that Sullivan asked for a pay hike but was refused. After a meeting with the station’s program director, she “did storm out of the building,” an unidentified KFWB staffer told RadioDigest.
Attempts to reach Sullivan were unsuccessful.
