A Fistful Of Dollars’ TV Series In Development At Mark Gordon Pictures

 

DEADLINE

By Justin Kroll

September 29, 2020

EXCLUSIVE: The classic spaghetti western that helped launch Clint Eastwood’s career looks to be getting the TV treatment as we are hearing Mark Gordon Pictures is developing A Fistful of Dollars as a series. The company has acquired the rights to the 1964 film as well as the Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai epic, Yojimbo, which the Eastwood film was based on. We are also hearing Game of Thrones scribe Bryan Cogman is in talks to adapt the series.

Yojimbo and its shot-for-shot remake A Fistful of Dollars tell the story of a wandering stranger, “the Man With No Name,” who comes to a town riddled with violence and uses wit and skill to trick the town’s competing gangs into destroying each other.

The series will pull from this source material for an original, contemporary retelling of the story.

While Yojimbo stands on its own as another Kurosawa master class in filmmaking, A Fistful of Dollars not only launched Eastwood’s film career, but he would go on to reprise the role of the Man with No Name in other iconic westerns For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.

Mark Gordon Pictures has an existing deal with eOne, under which they continue to acquire, develop and produce an expansive slate of projects spanning multiple genres and mediums.

Italian Film Star ‘Waiting Foe Call’

 

The Charlotte News

By Emery Wister

January 2, 1969

     There’s an Italian motion picture star visiting in Charlotte this week and his name is Peter Lee Lawrence. 

     Don’t laugh. He’s a native of Germany, citizen of the France, was educated in England and has the name and accent of an Englishman. He just happens to make his pictures in Italy,

     “Thirteen,” smiled the handsome lad who wears his blond hair in the long, modern style. “I was in a “A Few Dollars More” with Clint Eastwood but that was the only small role I played.” 

     Lawrence has starred in “A Few Bullets More” which played the Park Terrace Theater just before the current attraction “Bullitt” opened. Another of his movies “Killer Caliber .32”, is one of the biggest box office hits in Yokyo now.

     Lawrence is in Charlotte visiting his sister, Mrs. Karla Kennard, whose husband Steve sells securities for Bache & Co. here. And the new thing in movies, he says is war.

     “World War II,” he explains, “That’s the main thing now. The war pictures are the new Westerns, nationalistic Westerns I’d say.”

     LAWRENCE IS making his flicks in Europe because “I’m low budget. Vittorio Gassman is the big name in Italy. His movies cost 800 million lira. Me, I come in for 100 million but my first one cost only 60 million. I have the contacts in Hollywood but I’m waiting to be called.”

     Lawrence just completed a war picture in Italy with Guy Madison “Hell in Normandy” and a western with John Ireland, “A Pistol for 100 Coffins”.

     Lawrence is 24 and yes, he has been mobbed by admirers even as other players. .

     “They ripped my shirt off,” he says, “Yes, I’m single.”

     Not to long ago he starred in “Tempo de Charleston,” which is a Chicago gangster movie made in Madrid.

     “We did three versions,” he recalled, “One for Spain, one for Italy and one for U.S. The big difference is that we’re completely in the nude for the film shown here. And it will be shown in this country. I was just signed for the distribution rights.”

[Thanks to Mike Hauss for contributing this newspaper article.]

Special Birthdays

 

Jakob Sinn (actor) would have been 125 today, he died in 1967.

Slavoljub Plavsic-Zvonce (actor) would have been 85 today, he died in 2008.

 

 

 

 

 

Sewerin Teneva (actress) would have been 75 today, he died in 1983.