IN OFFICIAL SELECTION 'THE LION AND THE THRISTLE' WRITTEN BY JOHN DE HOLLAND

BIO::

In 2006 completing writing courses at the City Lit and The Arvon Foundation, John joined the MA in TV and Film screenwriting at LCC University Of The Arts in London.

After writing a short film and an episode of the BBC TV series ‘Coupling’, he deferred the remainder of the MA to work with author Laurence Gardner and DreamWorks adapting Laurence’s bestseller ‘Bloodline of The Holy Grail’ for the big screen.

After the project stalled John completed another MA in Feature Film Screenwriting at Royal Holloway College, University of London under Susan Rogers formerly head of Frances Ford Coppola’s company Zoetrope. He was awarded his MA ‘with merit’ in 2009 for the Victorian political thriller ‘The Lion and The Thistle’ which attracted the attention of the VP of New Line Cinema Ileen Maisel.

In 2009 Ileen Maisel now head of Amber Entertainment approached Laurence Gardner and John to adapt Laurence’s book ‘The Shadow Of Solomon’ for the cinema.

The working title of the contemporary interpretation is the supernatural thriller ‘The Last Magician’. The project is ongoing.

John has also finished a first draft of a new feature screenplay the ‘social class-comedy’ ‘The Monkey and The Master’ described as ‘My Fair Laddie for the 21st Century’. His creative partner on the project is the director Marn Davies who has recently completed two years work on Guy Ritchie’s film ‘Sherlock Holmes’.

In addition to his work as a screenwriter John is writing the Historical novel ‘Treason’.

Logline: "Tell me anyway--Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies." Leon Trotsky.

Outline:

It’s 1882 and with The Industrial Revolution and the age of Empire the world is changing. Young Highlander, Gray Cameron, leaving his widowed Italian mother and overbearing grandfather, sets off to London to seek his fortune.

He gains a position at The British Museum where he uncovers an English Secret Service conspiracy to murder Bonnie Prince Charlie’s grandson, Charles Edward Stewart, and prevent the Stuart’s claim to the English throne.

Gray is drawn into a plot to usurp Queen Victoria and the British Empire through a charismatic English nobleman and Jacobite sympathizer, Lord Bertram Ashburton and his mistress, the beautiful Russian Radka Rosopovitch.

But Radka leads a double life, her association with Ashburton, his Stuart cause, her fascination with Gray and her Marxist political convictions.

Gray discovers the terrible secret of his own father’s death and, pursued as a traitor by the English Secret Service, led by the Machiavellian Edward Chapman, the true meaning of love and betrayal.

Set in the Highlands, London and Rome amidst a background of Russian double agents, opium dens, courtesans, treason and the first stirrings of The Russian Revolution, the Lion and The Thistle is an intense, kinetic, political thriller with a love story at its heart.