Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies, Steven Strait With Emily Mortimer And Alan Arkin Star In Raymond De Felitta’s "City Island"
New York, NY (July 21, 2008) Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies and Steven Strait with Emily Mortimer and Academy Award winner Alan Arkin are set to star in Writer/Director Raymond De Felitta’s (Two Family House, Café Society, The Thing About My Folks) dysfunctional family comedy, “City Island.” Dominik Garcia-Lorido and Ezra Miller will co-star in the film. De Felitta’s Medici Entertainment, Andy Garcia’s CineSon and Lauren Versel for her Lucky Monkey Pictures will produce the film along with Zachary Matz. The Paradigm Motion Picture Finance Group packaged the film and will represent the domestic sale. Westend Films is the foreign sales company on the film which began shooting this week on location in City Island.
“It is rare to find material that captures the human condition with an emotional yet humorous content, in such an elegant framework. From the first read De Felitta’s script seduced me not only as an actor but as a producer” commented Andy Garcia
Based upon De Felitta’s original screenplay, “City Island” is the story of a Bronx prison deputy Vince Rizzo (Garcia) who recognizes a prisoner (Strait) as his grown child whom he sired with another woman twenty years earlier. He decides to be the young man’s guardian in Rizzo’s family’s home, but his efforts to conceal the nature of his relationship to the young man promptly begin to unravel the complex web of deceits which have worn the family fabric threadbare through the years.
Title refers to the actual fishing village in the Bronx where the story is set and shall be produced.
De Felitta commented on the production, “I am thrilled to have as a partner Andy Garcia, an artist I have admired for years as well as the rest of this amazing cast. Lucky Monkey is a great cutting edge independent film company that I am proud to be associated with. The presence of all of these people has made the 8 years it took to make this film worthwhile.”
Lucky Monkey Pictures’ Lauren Versel added, “City Island is a peek at what happens when dreams come true. Working with this exceptional director and this inspired cast is a dream realized for me.”
De Felitta will be blogging the entire making of the film — a first in the blogosphere with a project with this visibility — with daily behind the scenes clips on his longtime weblog “Movies Til Dawn” (www.moviestildawn.blogspot.com).
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