Alex Proyas To Direct JOE GOLEM AND THE DROWNING CITY
Dark City director Alex Proyas is set to direct a live-action adaptation of the graphic novel Joe Golem and the Drowning City, from Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden. I'm a fan of Proyas' earlier film work, and it would be cool to see him make another great movie. This sounds like it could be a pretty awesome movie!
The the comic has a supernatural-steampunk tone, and the story follows "an orphaned teenage girl, an aging magician, a lunatic scientist, a Victorian occult detective, and the stalwart sidekick, Joe Golem—a man whose strange dreams hint of a history he has forgotten–as they struggle for the fate of an alternate 1970s lower Manhattan. In this vision, lower Manhattan sank into the water during a catastrophic earthquake in 1925, leaving those unwilling or unable to abandon it to make a new life in streets turned to canals."
The film rights were picked up by Constantin Films, and Proyas plans to shoot it in his native Australia. This could be an awesome project for Proyas to tackle. I hope it actually ends up getting made as he hasn't had the best luck with some of the recent films he's signed on to direct. For one reason or another they keep falling through, but maybe this one will stick. Proyas has recently been attached to Gods of Egypt and The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.
Do you think Proyas is a solid choice to take on this adaptation? If you've read the comic do you think it will make a good movie?
Here's a descroption of the Comic:
In 1925, earthquakes and a rising sea level left Lower Manhattan submerged under more than thirty feet of water, so that its residents began to call it the Drowning City. Those unwilling to abandon their homes created a new life on streets turned to canals and in buildings whose first three stories were underwater. Fifty years have passed since then, and the Drowning City is full of scavengers and water rats, poor people trying to eke out an existence, and those too proud or stubborn to be defeated by circumstance.
Among them are fourteen-year-old Molly McHugh and her friend and employer, Felix Orlov. Once upon a time Orlov the Conjuror was a celebrated stage magician, but now he is an old man, a psychic medium, contacting the spirits of the departed for the grieving loved ones left behind. When a seance goes horribly wrong, Felix Orlov is abducted by strange men wearing gas masks and rubber suits, and Molly soon finds herself on the run.
Her flight will lead her into the company of a mysterious man, and his stalwart sidekick, Joe Golem, whose own past is a mystery to him, but who walks his own dreams as a man of stone and clay, brought to life for the sole purpose of hunting witches.