Help Get Chris Evans and Brie Larson to Star in An Important Film

Thirty stars and professors have signed a petition in my wife Briggs's memory to, as Susan Sarandon has said of it, "usher in a new era in cancer twenty years ahead of time."

They include Scarlett Johansson, Bradley Cooper, and Emily Blunt, and one of the professors won 2018's Nobel Prize in Medicine for his advances in immunotherapy.

Using the immune system, immunotherapy's worked in resistant children's leukemia, former president Jimmy Carter's stage IV melanoma, stage IV colorectal cancer (which took Chadwick Boseman so young, at 43), advanced brain cancer; and researchers at the National Cancer Institute have used it to save a 49-year-old woman with terminal breast cancer, a world 1st.

I moved back to Sydney from NYC, partly to get away from memories everywhere, good as well as bad. I've focused on the petition, writing related articles, and, e.g., a challenge to get signatures. It's been taken by Chris Evert, Rafael Nadal, Nick Kyrgios, squash great Nick Matthew & adventurer Bear Grylls.

I did a polish of a play of Briggs's and mine here, though, and a Broadway director said to go ahead and say he wants to direct to get producers to read it. He had two hits running simultaneously in London's West End before the pandemic. Alan Rickman had also read it at one point, to co-star, generously calling it "beautifully constructed and brilliantly written."

The producer of a major film franchise also produces theatre. After she asked for a copy, a premise for a film with that iconic lead character came to me. Then I thought how much more it could be if I made the female lead equal and gave her a hidden agenda. She's a free-spirited UCLA researcher but served as a reserve Marine/medic overseas and can handle a gun. She lost her mother to cancer and has a daring plan to get Congress and the President to act on the same issues as in my campaign.

When Briggs and I were in L.A. years ago on the back of an Off-Broadway play of ours, a substantial offer was made to an A-list star on a 'pacifist actioner' we'd written. His agent had read it, and a Warner Bros.-based director didn't want to change a word, but a Beverly Hills lawyer I talked with proved right that this particular star wouldn't accept without a studio directly involved.

This new script's in the same vein. As I've been out of the loop quite a while, I got 'studio coverage' from L.A.'s Tracking Board/Launch Pad to see if it might give me anything to quote.

They called it "a riveting thriller with a strong sense of high stakes and suspense." They wrote that the male lead is "likable, charismatic and admirably shrewd." Describing him as "highly experienced in tracking down and apprehending terrorist cells across the world," they added that "he has palpable chemistry with the female lead and his love interest."

Not to give away too much, they say, "As the story begins, he gets an unusual new assignment: a beautiful, brilliant scientist and cancer researcher has hired him to stop her billionaire inventor father from carrying out his own domestic terrorist plot." He "believes the world needs to be saved from itself and its own self-destructive tendencies" but "the reader still empathizes with him and his emotional pain."

As for the female lead's hidden agenda: "The script takes a number of intriguing twists and turns" and "the big twist-reveal that she has her own murderous plan is effectively surprising and dramatically impactful." They end by saying the film "will find an enthusiastic audience seeking out smart, dynamic crime thrillers." If you'd like to see Brie and Chris star in it, I hope you'll sign. The box is at top right.

(This is a short article about the story behind my campaign if you might want to sign the petition in Briggs's memory too: medium.com/From-a-Sword-in-LA-to-a-Racquet-in-NYC.)