Roberts Finds Reliance Coin for "Neighborhood"

In the film she's making, Julia Roberts’ "Eat, Pray, Love" character goes all the way to Italy, India and Indonesia to find herself. Roberts only had to go to India to find production coin to keep her production company Red Om flush with projects. 

Red Om just bought screen rights to “In the Neighborhood," a non-fiction book by Peter Lovenheim to be published next April by Perigree. It is the fifth film project her company has made through its first-look with Reliance Big Entertainment, as Red Om is one of the 10 development funding deals the India-based giant made last spring with production companies of A-list stars and directors.

Reliance Big Entertainment’s hope is to grow 30 star-driven films it can co-finance with studios. That coin is proving indispensable for keeping the development pump primed for those producers lucky enough to find it. With rare exception, studios are just not buying right now.

“In the Neighborhood” starts with Lovenheim’s realization that there is a lack of community in his suburban hometown. In an effort to get to know his neighbors better, he asks if he can come to their homes for sleepovers. His goal: to facilitate something more than the feeling of strangers living with strangers in modern suburbia. Red Om sparked to the Capra-esque element and Reliance Big agreed.

Philip Rose and Lisa Gillan and Julia Roberts will produce for Red Om, with Hotchkiss and Associates brokering the deal for the Markson Thomas Literary Agency.

Reliance Big Entertainment has set four other ambitious projects for Roberts and her producing partners:

“My Mother The Cheerleader,” the Robert Sharenow Civil Rights-era novel of a 13-year old girl whose mother is part of a group of women in New Orleans who harass the first black student after court-ordered integration. Mother and daughter are prompted to reconsider their attitude by a New York editor who comes to stay at their rooming house. 

“Jesus Henry Christ,” scripted/directed by Dennis Lee, who collaborated with Roberts on “Fireflies in the Garden.”

“Mallory,” a script by Matthew Faulk and Mark Skeet on the life of George Mallory, the English mountaineer who was part of the first three British expeditions up Mount Everest in the 1920s. On the third, he disappeared and his body wasn’t found until 75 years later.

“The Journey of the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon,” a book that tells the tragic story of a fast-rising photographer who chronicled the deadly famine in Somalia until, at 22, Dan Eldon was chased down and brutally murdered by a mob in Somalia. The mob was enraged over a deadly missile strike by a U.N. helicopter in 1993. Latter project is being done in collaboration with Eldon’s mother, Kathy, who edited the compilation of her son’s journals. 

Reliance Big Entertainment expects to see a payoff on its minimum $20 million investment next year, when more than one picture is expected to be ready for production, from the likes of George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Jim Carrey, Jay Roach, Brett Ratner and Chris Columbus.