Sergio Leone’s Heirs to Produce Spaghetti Western TV
Series Titled ‘Colt’
Variety
By Nick Vivarelli
May 25, 2016
ROME — Italy’s expanding Leone Film Group is venturing
into the Spaghetti Western territory so dear to its late great founder with an
English-language TV series titled “Colt,” based on an idea developed by Sergio
Leone, master of the genre.
The concept is centered around the six-shooter packed by
Clint Eastwood in “For a Fistful of Dollars.”
“It’s from my father’s idea in which the gun was the main
character and the device through which the tale is told,” said Raffaella Leone,
who now runs Leone Film Group with her brother Andrea.
“We are thinking of six episodes, each one connected to a
single gunshot. But we could do more,” she added.
Italian director Stefano Sollima, who has made a name for
himself helming Sky’s naturalistic Neapolitan mob drama “Gomorra,” which is
Italy’s all-time top TV export, will direct the first two episodes and act as
showrunner.
In 1987 Sergio Leone hooked up with his old writing
partners Sergio Donati and Fulvio Morsella to work on an idea for a TV skein
about a Colt revolver that passes from owner to owner throughout the Old West.
The concept is somewhat similar to Anthony Mann’s James Stewart-starrer
“Winchester ’73,” which traces the journey of a prized rifle from one ill-fated
owner to another.
Donati reportedly recounted that Leone was interested in
a more naturalistic take on the Spaghetti Western genre than his earlier works,
wanting to show the Old West “like it really was.” After Donati wrote a
treatment draft he then abandoned the project.
Sollima, who’s late father Sergio Sollima was the
Spaghetti Western pioneer who directed Lee Van Clef-starrer “The Big Gundown,”
among other cult pics, is writing the “Colt” screenplay with Italo scribes Luca
Infascelli and writer/director Massimo Gaudioso (“Welcome to the South”).
“The idea is a story about how a bunch of kids become
outlaws in the Old West,” Raffaella Leone said. “It starts out when they are
adolescents and traces their becoming bandits within the arc of the six
episodes,” she added.
Leone went on to note that “Colt” will be “like a prequel
to ‘Jessie James’,” referring to the 1939 classic Western in which young
brothers Jessie and Frank James, played respectively by Tyrone Power and Henry
Fonda, become outlaws after exacting revenge on their mothers’ assassin.
Leone Film Group is in advanced talks with several
unspecified U.S. and European partners to board the show which is likely to be
shot in the U.S.
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