LOS ANGELES Two American producer-directors, on opposite coasts, are in the process of turning Yehuda Avners book The Prime Ministers into separate films.
In Los Angeles, Academy Award winner Richard Trank has started work on a documentary based on the bestseller and expects to complete the project by November, 2012.
In suburban Washington, Ari Pinchot, head of Crystal City Entertainment, is scheduling a feature film, with actors portraying some of Israels greatest leaders.
Pinchot said he hoped to develop a script by next spring, start production in the summer and complete the film, on a $10 million budget, in 2013.
In his 715-page book, the British-born Avner draws intimate portraits of the four prime ministers he served as adviser, English speechwriter and ambassador Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin.
Read Rabbi Hillel Goldberg’s review of The Prime Ministers
Such a historical tome typically does not attract filmmakers, but Avners writing combines the credibility and immediacy of an eyewitness with the skill of a novelist in his vivid accounts of 20 tension-filled years, from 1963 to 1983, in Israels history.
The book, published by Toby Press, has an impressive fan list, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Trank is executive producer of Moriah Films, affiliated with the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Together with Rabbi Marvin Hier, the centers founder and dean, Trank won an Oscar for The Long Way Home (1997).
Crystal City Entertainment is a film production and financing company that partnered with Sony Pictures in the recently released The Ides of March with George Clooney.
