Savage street crime isn't confined to the big cities anymore. It's spreading like a dark stain across the heartland of America.
In Los Angeles, the festive warmth of a family party is shockingly violated by a trio of desperate drug peddlers. Before our eyes, the jittery thugs coldly slaughter an entire innocent family of "witnesses." This rainbow coalition of drug thugs is led by the ice-cold killer PLUTO (Michael Beach), an urban black and a brilliant tactician, but with a dead soul. The muscle is provided by the explosive RAY (Billy Bob Thornton), a white-trash Texan who has little or no control over his roller-coastering emotions.
Ray's moods are often tied to his feelings about FANTASIA (Cynda Williams), his girlfriend and the group's weak link, a small town beauty who is in way over her head.
A mullatta sadly misused in her teens, Fantasia fled the rural South toward the bright lights of L.A. -- only to be victimized again. In her darkest hour Fantasia is drawn back home, to the tiny Arkansas town that is the only place her earth where she was ever happy.
The two shrewd L.A. cops on the case, DUD (Jim Metzler) and McFEELY (Earl Billings) see just how things are shaping up. Fantasia has lifted the drug money and is bringing it all back home -- with Ray and Pluto in hot pursuit.
Meanwhile, a few miles off the main road in peaceful Star City, Arkansas, Fantasia's home town, a home-grown country sheriff, DALE "HURRICANE" DIXON (Bill Paxton), prepares to stand tall against the big-city evil that is heading straight at him.
Hurricane doesn't realize how much trouble he's really asking for. But he's's seen a few too many cop shows movie on TV, and he's had a grain of sand rubbing at his conscience for quite a few years now. Hurricane is determined to redeem himself, or die trying... **
Actor Bill Paxton, who plays the outclassed but stubbornly heroic Sheriff Hurricane in One False Move, says he liked the script immediately "because it kind of reminded me of a Jim Thompson novel. And along with a kind of film noir I saw the script as a contemporization of the Western genre."
One False Move is a violent, naturalistic thriller in the gritty, white-trash tradition of the so-called "Black Lizard" authors -- Jim Thompson, Charles Williams, Harry Whittington, Charles Willeford: Southerners all, they found a mood akin to noir on the hot and dusty "Tobacco Roads" of Dixie.
This movie brings the urban and the rural traditions of noir explosively together. It's central motif is an incursion of feral urban crime into a seemingly idyllic rural environment. An initial explosion of senseless violence is the springboard of tension in One False Move -- and its intensity may be startling, even for some people who consider themselves immune to movie mayhem. The shock comes from seeing violence that's presented seriously and realistically, not as exploitative fodder for adolescent fantasy.
Two of the movie's central characters are debased human specimens for whom erasing the opposition has become a neutral act, a simple means to an end. One False Move is a uniquely terrifying film because it creates fully rounded criminal characters, all too human monsters whose authenticity is undeniable -- and impossible to shrug off.
"The key is that neither the victims nor the killers here are dehumanized," insists co-producer Jesse Beaton. "Those are precious human lives being snuffed out, and we want you to feel that."
The threat of violence drives this tightly constructed thriller full speed ahead toward a fatal point at which the fates of all the characters collide.
"The whole movie is about atonement," agrees director Carl Franklin. "It's about reaping what you sow. The script was called Hurricane, and that character, the sheriff that Bill Paxton plays so well, is the center of the story. He brings it all on himself, in a sense."
Franklin, who is black, nevertheless felt he understood the character of this white red-neck Southern sheriff: "He is what he is, he's not perfect, he's the product of that environment, but he does try to behave honorably. What he gradually realizes is that what he's facing up to are the consequences of his own actions -- although I don't want to say too much, here, you know, because there are supposed to be a few surprises!"
One False Move also brings an unusual authenticity of texture to the rural Southern milieu that stands in opposition to the killing crew from the big city. The script was written by Billy Bob Thornton, who also plays the explosive lunatic Ray Malcolm, and his long-time writing partner Tom Epperson, who grew up together in a town very much like the fictitious Star City, Arkansas. Their bone-deep knowledge of these people and places enriched every page they wrote.
Interracial relationships are a furtive fact of life in this environment, and for Cynda Williams, one clear attraction of the project was its resonance with her own background. A rising recording artist who lit up the screen as the torch singer Clarke Betancourt in Spike Lee's jazz film Mo' Better Blues, Williams was raised in Chicago by a white mother and a black father.
"The circumstances Fantasia comes from I can identify with," the actress says. "The writers captured the essence of that interracial situation, what it stems from and what it grows into."
Director Carl Franklin sees Fantasia as the second pivot of the picture's plot. "Fantasia's whole life is reactive," he says, "very passive. A lot of the worst things that happen in the movie are the result of her failure to take control of her life away from the various people who oppress her."
Billy Bob Thornton co-wrote the script and plays Williams' abusive white boyfriend Ray in the film -- and the story of the film seemed to bleed over into real life when Williams and Thornton fell in love on the set, marrying shortly after the picture wrapped.
"Our actual relationship is nothing like the one in the movie," Williams insists, laughing. "He's nothing like that. And he says he loves me for myself!"
Although Thornton says he did not write Ray with himself in mind as an actor, he adds that he likes Ray and enjoyed playing him -- despite the man's often brutal character traits.
Screenwriter Thornton explains that "Ray helps keep the level of tension up, because you never know what he's going to be like from one minute to the next." As an actor, Thornton sees the character in less purely functional terms: "He's still human, Ray, he still has emotions -- great big emotions. His problem is that he has no control over them at all."
As a stark contrast to the volatile Ray, Thornton and Epperson created the character of the ice-cold criminal technician, Pluto. It was later decided to weave the movie's interracial fabric a bit tighter by assigning the role to a black actor. Gifted Michael Beach, memorable in Lean on Me and Internal Affairs, Pluto becomes one of the most frightening pure sociopaths in recent movie history.
"I enjoyed playing Pluto," Beach admits. "I liked that he was evil, but he had an IQ of 15. That made him an interesting character to play." Another big draw, for Beach, was helmet Carl Franklin: "And not just because he was an actor; it was great to have a chance to work with a black director. There was so much that just didn't need to be said."
The One False Move collaborators have since moved on to other endeavors. Billy Bob Thornton will be co-starring in the fall in a new TV series created by Designing Women's Linda Bloodworth-Thomeson. And director Carl Franklin and producer Jesse Beaton will team up again this summer to create a series about black family life, Laurel Avenue, for HBO.
SYNOPSIS
In South Central Los Angeles the private warmth of a birthday gathering is shockingly violated by a trio of desperate drug peddlers. There's no honor among thieves here as both the purchase money and the cocaine end up with the invaders.
The gang is a veritable rainbow coalition of low end sociopaths. FANTASIA (Cynda Williams), a beautiful mulatta, seems to be terrified less by the volatile situation than by her potentially explosive companions: her boyfriend RAY (Billy Bob Thornton), is a white trash bully whose cork tends to pop savagely without warning, while PLUTO (Michael Beach), is an intense young black man so coldly emotionless that he could be capable of anything...
And just as a precaution, Pluto calmly slaughters an entire innocent family of "witnesses." Fantasia, shaken by the carnage and searching the house, comes upon a small boy hiding in a closet. A rush of pity prompts her to conceal him from her deadly companions.
The next day, two case-hardened L.A. cops stroll almost nonchalantly through the blood spattered crime scene. The jaded, hard-drinking DUD (Jim Metzler) and his easy-going partner McFEELY (Earl Billings) learn from a video taken at the party that the invaders next stop is Star City, a small town in Arkansas, although what the outlaws hope to find there remains a mystery.
It is arranged with the home-grown sheriff of Star City, DALE "HURRICANE" DIXON (Bill Paxton), that the big city officers will fly to Arkansas to set a trap for the fugitives. Hurricane, whose notions of heroic police work have been shaped by a few too many TV cops shows, can barely contain himself; the L.A. detectives beg him not to start without them.
On the road, tensions build among the drug peddlers. Pluto is a stickler for planning and neatness, and Ray's vulgarity and chaotic emotions grate on his nerves. Their plan is to stop off in Houston first, to sell the drugs, then head on to Star City.
Dud and McFeely arrive in Star City and "meet cute" with Sheriff Hurricane. The small town law-man struts happily as he shows the two detectives the local ropes. Hurricane's cajoling technique for settling a drunken marital dispute, and his bone deep knowledge of his environment, may not be high tech policework, but it gets the job done.
McFeely bristles at Hurricane's naive racist attitudes, second nature for a half-educated white boy in this neck of the woods.
In Houston, the fugitives grow increasingly jittery as they learn that the police have their names and mug shots. The attempted "big score" drug sale leads to further violence. Fantasia and Ray are photographed by the surveillance camera in a convenience store, and young state trooper who happens to be shopping there follows the trio in his patrol car and pulls them over. The tension in the encounter escalates until the trooper is shot dead -- apparently by Fantasia, although the fact scarcely seems to register upon the girl herself.
The gang decides to split up. Fantasia takes the bus to meet her family in Star City: Ray and Pluto will follow a day later. As Fantasia takes her leave, she impulsively lifts all the drug money. Now her partners are boiling mad as they race after her, on a collision course straight toward Star City. The photos from the store's camera are relayed to the cops in Star City. Hurricane is shocked to realize that he knows Fantasia. She was a key figure from a guilty period of his own past. Her real name is Lila Davis, and when she ran to Hollywood she left an illegitimate infant son behind with her mother and younger brother. "Fantasia" is heading home for a reunion with her child.
Hurricane overhears Dud and McFeely making fun of his grandiose plan to move to L.A. to become a big city cop. This piercing humiliation spurs him to reckless solo action in an attempt to prove himself. When Fantasia arrives in town, her brother leads her to the abandoned house he's selected as a hiding place, and brings her son there to see her, Hurricane follows. He bursts into the house to confront the woman who was his interracial mistress when she was still a teenager.
Hurricane resists Fantasia's attempts to manipulate his guilty conscience. He'll pay for that "one false move" in his past not by allowing her to escape, but by doing his duty as a law enforcement officer. As a last-ditch trick, she confirms his shameful suspicion: the small boy he's always refused to acknowledge is also his, the offspring of their brief relationship.
The boy eventually leads Dud and McFeely back the remote cabin. But the cops arrive a few jumps behind Ray and Pluto. Hurricane confronts the desperate criminals alone, and in the aftermath of a bloody, messy showdown, holds out a hand to his child for the first time...
ABOUT THE CAST
BILL PAXTON ("Hurricane")
Explosive character actor Bill Paxton makes a stalwart transition to leading roles in One False Move. Paxton stars as Sheriff Dale "Hurricane" Dixon, a conscientious down-home lawman who sees a chance to live out his TV-fed dreams of glory when his small Arkansas town is invaded by a trio of urban drug thugs.
From the first read-through, Paxton was drawn to the script, by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, "because it reminded me of a Jim Thompson novel. I also saw it as a kind of contemporary Western."
He was impressed by the multi-faceted character of Sheriff Hurricane:
"Although he's the protagonist, he has to atone for things in his past, like everyone else in the film. Initially 'Hurricane' seems to be something of a good ol' boy, but as the film progresses he becomes increasingly three dimensional, as he responds to a plot that comes to hinge upon him.
"I'm very happy with my work in this film. I think Carl (Franklin) is the best actor's director I've ever worked with."
High praise from a performer whose fearless leaders have included James Cameron, Walter Hill, John Hughes, and Kathryn Bigelow.
Bill Paxton caught the film bug early, shooting full length feature films in Super-8 as a teenager in Forth Worth, Texas. At 18, he followed his heart to Hollywood, where he quickly found work, not yet at the top of the ladder, as a set dresser on Roger Corman's 1974 New World production, Big Bad Mama.
Laboring in the New World art department for three years, on grisly B-movie hits like Galaxy of Terror and Forbidden World, Paxton began a fruitful association with the then-head of Corman's art department, aspiring director James Cameron.
When Paxton left the art department to study acting in New York, and he soon began to get steady work in low-budget features like Night Warning (1982). Supporting roles followed in The Lords Of Discipline and The Terminator, James Cameron's breakthrough effort as a director.
The critics took notice when Paxton played Anthony Michael Hall's obnoxious older brother, Chet, in John Hughes' Weird Science, and was transformed into one of the grossest (and funniest) special effects creatures ever devised.
In Cameron's Aliens, Paxton made a strong impression as the cowardly loud-mouth Hudson, and in Kathryn Bigelow's moody, dusty, Southwestern vampire picture Near Dark, he drank blood and went up in flames.
One of Bill Paxton's most acclaimed performances was his sly turn as a bandit chief in the little-seen Pass the Ammo, a satiric comedy about televangelism. Pauline Kael declared, "Bill Paxton has the vitality of a star ... he's a real sparkplug."
Paxton has appeared recently in Predator 2, in the tragic farce The Dark Backward, in the upcoming releases The Vagrant, a dark comic thriller directed by Chris Walas, and The Looters, a gritty caper thriller from action-master Walter Hill.
Bill Paxton is also a founding member of the rock band Martini Ranch, whose two MTV videos were directed by James Cameron.
CYNDA WILLIAMS (Fantasia)
Cynda Williams is an absorbing, enigmatic presence in One False Move. The sly passivity of her character, Fantasia, small-town beauty turned big city drug=madonna, sets the lethal events of the story in motion. Her effortless charisma in this difficult and mysterious role confirms the strong impression Williams made in 199 in her first film role as the sleek torch singer Clarke Betancourt in Spike Lee's 'Mo Better Blues. Williams was born in Chicago, the oldest of five children of a white mother and a black father. Her fascination with Fantasia, she says, stems in part from the interracial heritage she shares with the character: "The circumstances that she comes from, I can identify with. I don't mean the poverty or the lack of security and love growing up. But the writers capture the essence of that interracial situation, what it stems from and what it grows into."
As a child Williams dream was to become a singer, in the romantic soft-jazz style of her work in 'Mo Better Blues. When her family relocated to Muncie, Indiana, Williams combined her first love with a brand new passion for acting, playing lead roles in high school musical productions like West Side Story, A Chorus Line, A Raisin in the Sun, and Little Shop of Horrors.
After graduating as a theater major from Ball State University, Williams crossed her fingers and left for New York, determined to launch a career either in singing or acting, "whichever came first." Almost at once she landed the plum role of the singer Clarke in 'Mo Better Blues, which happily combined her two ambitions. Her performance in the film was praised by critics, and her solo production number, "Harlem Blues," was released as a single and climbed the R&B charts. Lee was evidently pleased with Williams' work in the film: he gave her a pivotal follow-up role in his next picture, Jungle Fever.
One False Move was a deliberate change of pace from the high-toned characters Williams had played before. "I wanted to play somebody different," she says, "and Fantasia is that! When I read it I knew it could be true, that I could feel the way she does. Fantasia has an innocence about her through everything that happens and despite all the havoc she wreaks. That's because she's a survivor, and really all she's been doing is fighting conditions that have been thrust upon her."
Williams personal life has changed, too, as a direct result of her involvement with One False Move. During shooting she fell in love with co-star and co-screenwriter Billy Bob Thornton. The performers were married shortly after the film wrapped, and make their home in Los Angeles.
BILLY BOB THORNTON (Ray, co-screenwriter)
Billy Bob Thornton says it was a point of pride for him, and for his writing partner and life-long buddy Tom Epperson, that the issue of "miscegenation" (as interracial encounters are still designated in Deep Southern areas like Star City) was not the point of One False `Move. It was woven into the whole texture, he says: "It's just there."
Thornton also stars in the movie as nasty Ray, a vicious and hot-tempered drug smuggler. Thornton throws himself into this role with such abandon that some viewers may actually be dismayed to learn that he also dreamed it up. He insists, however, that he did not write the part with himself in mind. "But I've been playing good ol' boys for so long that it was a nice change of pace."
Thornton's co-star, Cynda Williams, who plays Ray's abused girlfriend Fantasia in the film, confirms that in real life he is nothing like the character he plays. And she should know: the two actors fell in on the set and were married shortly after the picture wrapped.
Both Thornton and Epperson are natives of Hot Springs, Arkansas, a small town very much like the fictitious Star City.
MICHAEL BEACH (Pluto)
Michael Beach turns in a fiercely concentrated performance as Pluto, the cold-blooded killer and cool-headed crime technician who guides the gang of drug thugs in One False Move.
Beach hails from Roxbury, Massachusetts, and made a big leap from his high school acting experience to four years of hard study at the Julliard School. He's been working steadily ever since. In his very first big screen outing, Beach held his own against famed scenery chewers Klaus Maria Brandaur and Wesley Snipes in Joe Roth's Streets of Gold.
In several roles Beach has exhibited a special insight into the fears of ordinary men trapped in untenable situations: as a false witness in the courtroom thriller Suspect, as an L.A. cop manipulated into informing on a corrupt college in Internal Affairs, as the athletic instructor who was one of harsh principal Morgan Freeman's early targets in Lean on Me, and as a man facing vigilante justice for a crime he didn't commit in the horror-comedy Guilty as Charged.
Michael Beach has appeared recently in Cadence, directed by Martin Sheen, in W.D. Richter's neglected cryonics comedy Home For Dinner, and in The Playground, directed by Bob Degus.
Beach admits that he enjoyed playing the compunctionless Pluto, who ruthlessly slaughters an entire family of innocent "witnesses" in the movie's opening scene.
"I liked that he was bad," the actor explains, "but he had an IQ of 150. That made him interesting to play."
EARL BILLNGS
(McFeely)
Veteran character actor Earl Billings plays the jaded L.A. cop McFeely, who thinks he's seen everything -- until he's confronted by the good ol' boy law enforcement style of Arkansas Sheriff Dale "Hurricane" Dixon in One False Move.
The city-dwellers jaundiced outlook on rural life came naturally to Billings, a Cleveland native who spent his formative years in New York City. But obviously, his was not your standard city kid's upbringing: Billings landed his first professional acting gig at 16, in a Broadway show starring Lena Horne. In his 20s he was already a veteran of the famed Negro Ensemble Company.
After a move to Los Angeles, Bilings' career caught fire on television in the early '8s. He had a recurring role as a sarcastic soda jerk on the long-running series What's Happening?, and guest starred on dozens of top shows, including Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, and Mancuso, FBI. He played a night watchman too poor to buy his son a train set on a popular Christmas episode of Michael Landon's Highway to Heaven.
Billings appeared in the TV movies Roots: The Next Generation and Blood Feud. His two most extreme TV assignments were probably Kids Don't Tell, in which he played a child molester) and Minstrel Man, which featured Billings as a black vaudevillian who performs in white face.
On the big screen Billings has appeared in the John Belushi biopic Wired, in Stakeout (as a police chief) and in Sounder 2.
JIM METZLER
(Dudley)
Jim Metzler's "Dud" Dudley is an all-pro L.A. cop, out of place in a small Arkansas town where he's playing waiting game in his battle with a ruthless gang of drug thugs.
Metzler's seasoned professionalism as an actor meshed well with the understated strength of the proud cop he plays in One False Move. His easy physical authority in the role could be traced back to his days as a professional athlete, a pitcher in the Boston Red Sox organization.
After training at Dartmouth College and the National Theater Institute, Metzler won acclaim (and a Golden Globe nomination) for his work in Tim Hunter's Tex, as Matt Dillon's conscientious older brother who struggles to hold a parentless household together.
He worked again for director Hunter in The River's Edge, and with Jane Fonda in The Old Gringo. Although respected for the sense of authenticity he brings to down-to-earth characters, Metzler recently went a bit further out, portraying a "cybernetic gigolo" in the inventive SF cult picture Circuitry Man.
Metzler's star vehicles on TV include the mini-series' North and South and North and South Part 2, and On the Wings of Eagles, the MOWs Christmas Star, The Alamo: 134 Days to Glory, Princess Daisy, Little Match Girl and Do You Remember Love?
He appeared as a regular on the series' Cutter to Houston and The Best of Times.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
CARL FRANKLIN
(Director)
"He's the best actor's director I've ever worked with," flatly states performer Bill Paxton, of One False Move top-liner Carl Franklin. And the assertion makes perfect sense: Franklin was a successful actor himself before turning his energies to the challenge of directing feature films.
After studying History and Dramatic Arts at Berkeley, Franklin began his acting career pretty close to the top of the heap, at the New York Shakespeare Festival in New York. There, and at the Arena Stage and Lincoln Center, he appeared in productions of Cymbeline, Timon of Athens, Pantagleize Twelfth Night and The Duplex.
After a stopover in the Bay Area to appear in Norman, Is That You?, Franklin came to Los Angeles to accept a film role in Five On The Black Hand Side, and he has been here ever since.
Stage roles in L.A. productions of Saint Joan and Macbeth were followed by a wide range of TV work. Franklin was a regular on three series, Caribe, with Stacey Keach, Fantastic Journey, with Roddy McDowell, and McClain's Law, with James Arness.
Franklin was asked to returned to the stage in the '8s to appear in the acclaimed Taper, Too production of In The Belly Of the Beast, which moved on to the Taper Mainstage and finally to the 1985 Sydney Festival in Australia. Between this turns on the stage, Franklin found time to make recurring appearances as tough guy Captain Crane on the archtypal '8s action series The A-Team.
In 1986, Franklin entered a course of study at the American Film Institute, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Directing.
While still enrolled at AFI, Franklin began working professionally as a director on low-budget features for Roger Corman's Concorde Films. The best of them, Franklin says, was Nowhere To Run, which starred David Carradine and current TV heartthrob Jason Priestly, of Beverly Hills, 90210. The only good thing he has to say about the back-to-back Peruvian location shoots for his other two Corman outings (which shall remain nameless) is that after that ordeal, even the experience of shooting One False Move in steamy rural Arkansas barely ruffled his feathers.
After a screening of AFI graduation film, "Punk," Franklin was signed to direct One False Move for IRS Media. Currently working as an instructor at AFI, while completing a feature screenplay, Franklin will re-team this summer with producer Jesse Beaton on "Laurel Avenue," a limited series for HBO that studies an extended urban black family over the course of a single weekend.
JESSE BEATON
(Producer)
Jesse Beaton understands that the strong violence in One False Move, her first feature film as a producer, will shock some people. But, she insists, exploitation was not intent: "The key is that neither the killers nor the victims are dehumanized. Those are human lives being snuffed out, and we want you to feel that."
After studying Mass Media and Communications at Berkeley, Beaton launched a career in the book business, handling marketing chores for Bookpeople, a successful distributor of independent publications. But in August of 1975 she made a big jump, to the sales department of the San Francisco branch of Paramount Pictures. Beaton has been involved in various aspects of the movie business ever since.
After two years at Paramount, Beaton formed her own company, Encore, acting as a buying agent and film booker for commercial, art and repertory screens throughout the Northwest.
As Beaton's reputation spread, new opportunities opened up. She worked as the program director of the Mill Valley Film Festival, as the producer of Penn & Teller's traveling show Mrs. Lonsberry's Seance of Horror, and as the producer's rep for El Norte, securing US distribution rights and supervising the campaign.
In the fall of 1984, Beaton shifted her headquarters to Los Angeles, to accept a post as Vice-President of Marketing & Distribution at Island Alive. There she handled the acquisition, marketing and distribution of such landmark independent productions as Choose Me, Stop Making Sense, Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Trip to Bountiful and Mona Lisa.
Jesse Beaton was one of the first people in the film business to grasp the commercial potential of personal films like Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, Percy Adlon's Bagdad Cafe, Tim Hunter's River's Edge, and Nikita Mikhalkov's Dark Eyes. Few insiders were surprised when, in 1987, she was promoted to Senior Vice-President of Production and Development at Island.
Since 1988, Beaton has been developing her own projects to produce, while working as a consultant for Miramax Pictures, Island Pictures and Siren Films. She is the US representative for Channel Four/Film Four, of London, and is an acquisitions consultant for Kazui Enterprises, who distribute European and American independent films in Japan.
Beaton and One False Move director Carl Franklin are preparing Shelton Street, a limited series for HBO about one weekend in the life of a black family.
BEN MYRON
(Producer)
Ben Myron began his film career as an exhibitor in the San Francisco Bay Area. While still operating theaters, Myron produced his first feature film there, Signal 7, written and directed by Rob Nillson. The film was an art house and film festival success, and its warm reception convinced Myron to devote his full energies to producing.
In 1988 Myron moved to Los Angeles to produce the dark comedy Checking Out, written by Joe Eszterhas, directed by true Brit David Leland and starring Jeff Daniels. Undeterred by the tepid box office results, he formed a partnership with Jesse Beaton to acquire and produce One False Move.
Ben Myron joined forces with director Roland Joffe in 1989, under the Lightmotive banner. Their first release will be City of Joy, directed by Joffe and starring Patrick Swayze, due from Tri-Star in April.
Future Lightmotive projects include Super Mario Brothers, based upon the video game, Billy, adapted by Whitley Strieber from his novel and directed by Nils Gaup (Pathfinder) and the musical Oh, The Places You'll Go!, adapted from the book by renowned children's author Dr. Seuss.