Legendary director and producer Barry Sonnenfeld – whose body of work includes The Addams Family films, Get Shorty, and the Men In Black franchise – has set his sights on making a feature film about Project Alpha. The elaborate hoax perpetrated by James Randi over thirty years ago is the focus of the feature length documentary, An Honest Liar, which numbers Sonnenfeld among its executive producers. The factual movie premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year, and now, the director has seen the potential for further storytelling.
“I sought out Justin and Tyler immediately after I watched An Honest Liar at Telluride Mountainfilm,” he said. “Not only did I love An Honest Liar, but I knew there was an excellent narrative film to be made out of this story, with James Randi playing the ‘behind the curtain’ puppeteer.”
James Randi – also known as The Amazing Randi – is a retired magician and...
“I sought out Justin and Tyler immediately after I watched An Honest Liar at Telluride Mountainfilm,” he said. “Not only did I love An Honest Liar, but I knew there was an excellent narrative film to be made out of this story, with James Randi playing the ‘behind the curtain’ puppeteer.”
James Randi – also known as The Amazing Randi – is a retired magician and...
- 3/13/2015
- by Sarah Myles
- We Got This Covered
Film is based on James ‘The Amazing’ Randi’s real-life hoax orchestrated with two fake psychics.
Barry Sonnenfeld will direct a film based on real-life hoax Project Alpha.
Orchestrated by James ‘The Amazing’ Randi and two fake psychics, Steve Shaw and Michael Edwards, Project Alpha lasted over two years and saw them participate in a paranormal research project led by researchers who thought the fake psychics had genuine powers.
The hoax is explored in current documentary An Honest Liar directed by Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom, distributed in the Us through Abramorama. The directing duo will serve as producers on the new film.
Sonnenfeld commented: “Not only did I love An Honest Liar, but I knew there was an excellent narrative film to be made out of this story, with James Randi playing the ‘behind the curtain’ puppeteer.”...
Barry Sonnenfeld will direct a film based on real-life hoax Project Alpha.
Orchestrated by James ‘The Amazing’ Randi and two fake psychics, Steve Shaw and Michael Edwards, Project Alpha lasted over two years and saw them participate in a paranormal research project led by researchers who thought the fake psychics had genuine powers.
The hoax is explored in current documentary An Honest Liar directed by Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom, distributed in the Us through Abramorama. The directing duo will serve as producers on the new film.
Sonnenfeld commented: “Not only did I love An Honest Liar, but I knew there was an excellent narrative film to be made out of this story, with James Randi playing the ‘behind the curtain’ puppeteer.”...
- 3/13/2015
- by ian.sandwell@screendaily.com (Ian Sandwell)
- ScreenDaily
Barry Sonnenfeld has signed on to direct a feature adaptation based on James “The Amazing' Randi's” Project Alpha, a real-life story that appeared in the feature documentary An Honest Liar. The project is currently in development. Justin Weinstein's and Tyler Measom's An Honest Liar is based on the life of psychic fake and debunker The Amazing Randi. Project Alpha was a ruse done by “Randi” along with Steve Shaw (known as Banachek) and Michael Edwards who auditioned for…...
- 3/12/2015
- Deadline
After jumping back into the fantastical world of the Men In Black series and pondering making Kevin Spacey swap bodies with a family cat in the still-developing Nine Lives, Barry Sonnenfeld is looking for a little dose of reality. Well, we say reality, because a potential future film is based on a hoax. Sonnenfeld is aboard to direct a film based on magician James “The Amazing” Randi’s Project Alpha idea, which ran in the late 1970s and early ‘80s and saw him and two fake psychics pull a fast one on paranormal researchers. The hoaxers, including Steve Shaw and Michael Edwards, made the scientific team believe they had legitimate psychic powers not for an hour or an afternoon, but for two bloomin’ years. The fraud was eventually revealed publicly in Discover magazine.The hoax is also covered in Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom’s documentary of Randi, An Honest Liar,...
- 3/12/2015
- EmpireOnline
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