SCHENECTADY, N.Y. (CN) - Albany-area business executives claim a screenwriter-director has delayed a movie, and asked a state judge to confirm their vote removing the man from the board of the LLC that's trying to make the murder mystery.
The executives, investors in plaintiff Dancehall LLC, sued Tennyson Bardwell and Daydreamer Films LLC, in Schenectady County Court. They claim that Bardwell has "placed his self-interest above his fiduciary duties to the company and its members by blocking any reasonable possibility that the film could be financed."
The film, "Dancehall," is to be based on a novel of the same name.
The investors, who hold a 50 percent stake in Dancehall LLC, claim the LLC was organized in 2009 to make the movie. They ask the court to uphold their removal of Bardwell as one of three managing members of the group.
They also seek an injunction barring Bardwell or his Daydreamer Films from asserting any ownership interest in the screenplay to "Dancehall" - which Bardwell wrote - or any right to direct or produce the film.
The investors claims that without booting Bardwell from the production, they will not be able to get outside financing before losing an August window for production in Lake Placid, the resort area in New York's Adirondack Mountains that is key to the film's story line.
"If the film is going to be made in 2012, it is imperative that financing must occur in the next several weeks," the complaint states. "Because the outdoor scenes in Lake Placid have to be completed prior to September, pre-production and pre-pre-production steps must be taken in the spring and early summer if the film is going to be made this year.
"Each year that the film remains uncompleted makes it more likely that the film will never be made."
The investors say they have ponied up close to $1.4 million for the movie, and loaned Dancehall LLC nearly $200,000. But almost all of that has been eaten up by expenses so the company "is virtually insolvent today, yet is not close to having a film that is ready for pre-production," according to the complaint.
The investors say the movie was supposed to have an $8 million budget.
"Dancehall," the novel, was written by local author Bernard Conners, an FBI agent in the 1950s who later became a publisher of The Paris Review. He subsequently led British American, a business in suburban Albany with far-flung interests in soft-drink manufacturing, real estate development, property management, book publishing, and TV and film production.
Conners based the murder mystery on the real-life discovery of "the lady in the lake": the surfacing of a young woman's body from the depths of Lake Placid in 1982, several decades after her death, and the subsequent questions about whether she was murdered or had committed suicide.
The book, published in 1983, was optioned for film. But by the time one of the organizers of Dancehall LLC, Edwin Graham, contacted Conners about the movie rights in 2009, that option had expired.
Dancehall LLC was set up with three managing members: Graham, who works locally in nonprofit management; Ann Marie Lizzi, a friend of his who has had a career in television advertising and production; and Bardwell, with whom Lizzi had worked on the film "Dorian Blues," an award-winning coming-of-age movie.
