"Hello Engine. I'm Jake Holman"

This play isn't available but I thought I'd mention it anyway. It's an adaptation of the film, The Sand Pebbles, starring Steve McQueen, Candice Bergen, Richard Krenna, Mako and Sir Richard Attenborough. Engineer Jake Holman (Holman) arrives aboard the gunboat U.S.S. San Pablo, assigned to patrol a tributary of the Yangtze in the middle of exploited and revolution-torn 1926 China. You can look it up the plot on the internet but I LOVE this movie - it's Steve McQueen's best work and much of the movie reads like a stageplay. Great score, a number of interlocking storylines, the setting is fantastic - truly an epic in every sense of the word. So I adapted a shooting script I found online, adding dialogue from the film that wasn't in the shooting script I had, as well as dialogue from the book that the movie was adapted from. I also added a couple scenes to punch up the storyline of one of the main characters.

I did this solely as a writing exercise and because I wanted to turn the movie on to my theater friends who weren't familiar with the film. Would I love to do this play though. One of the problems is the number of characters - there's a lot. The vastness of the sets/scenery would be an undertaking but it's quite do-able. Oh, I've actually never received permission from 20th Century Fox - I've tried but they never returned my calls or emails. And they won't - until I tell them that some theater wants to do the play, it's going up these dates, the venue is this big, etcetera, etcetera. THEN Fox will be interested in their fees.

Anyway, that's it. I'm planning to have a table read at some point. Maybe this little blurb will make you go out and rent the movie. It's worth it.