ACHILLES PRODUCTIONS LTD: FEATURE FILM PROJECTS
“THE KINGDOM BY THE SEA” © Richard Deakin O Baltimore, Man it’s hard just to live - Randy Newman INTRODUCTION This film will be tapping into one of the enduring myths: the tormented genius, in this case EDGAR ALLEN POE, dreaming his opium dreams in exquisite colours. A host of fantastic Poe images have been wrought over the centuries by Edmund Dulac (see illlustration), Aubrey Beardsley, Manet, Heath Robinson etc., - a treasure trove of erotic, hypnotic images which we will employ freely in the “dream” aspects of our film. ”THE KINGDOM BY THE SEA” will be a study in wild eccentric genius, diseased beauty, and love. We will see during the course of the story how Poe had, at the start, the chance of a more normal and less painful sexual life, but how fate in the form of ignorant relatives of his first woman drive him into the arms of his mother’s double, his own dear cousin, the sweet childlike GINNY. Only at the end of his story, when it is too late, does Poe get his chance to be “normal” again. The background to EDDIE’s adult life was a queer but functional family consisting of “MUDDY”, “Mother”, actually his aunt, who was also his mother-in-law and real parent of GINNY, Poe’s child-bride cousin, who was 13 when they married. GINNY’s and EDDIE’s relationship will be the great love story in our film. It was a chaste relationship almost to its tragic end, the “kingdom by the sea.” For long years of fugitive bliss, GINNY is slowly dying of tuberculosis, being “consumed” by the same disease that took Poe’s beautiful mother when he was three - the beautiful mother who was the double of Ginny. And “MUDDY”, Poe’s mother’s sister, looks after them all in their little Eden garden... It is a strange world he and the long-dying Ginny live in, the magical “kingdom by the sea” described in his poem “Annabel Lee”: I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea; But we loved with a love that was more than love- I and my Annabel Lee... Our film will tell the lyrical story of their tragic and perverse love affair. It was Poe’s lifelong dream to have a magazine of his own. But when, at the climax of our film, it becomes a real prospect, and he has the backing to launch the first great American literary magazine, it is too late. Worn down by poverty and the death of GINNY, he succumbs to drink, laudanum, despair and an early grave. Poe’s last fling on this earth will be shown like a dramatic “lost weekend” where he wanders the South in a stupor of alcohol and opium. The party begins in a bar on a paddle steamer and is brought to its tragic end in the dank gutters of Baltimore: “O Baltimore Man it’s hard just to live...” as Randy Newman puts it in the haunting song that may perhaps accompany Poe’s last demented wanderings along the river in our movie’s Act Three.