FILM PITCH: Heads Will Roll

So I was pottering about in the French Revolution for a new project, and I came a new idea for a joke film pitch. My Blücher biopic got less plaudits than Joaquin Phoenix playing Napoleon, but that’s fair. Nobody wants to look at a wrinkly old German dude for three hours. So for any TV execs reading this with the license to give me a lot of money, check this out instead:

The lead character is Olympe de Gouges and she was born in 1748, which made her round about 40 when it all kicked off at the end of the 18th Century in Paris… So think Marion Cotillard in the lead, possibly Kate Winslet, Reese Wetherspoon. Just don’t be doing that thing you do where you cast a 25 year old with firmer boobs and expect us all to buy that she’s menopausal with grown up kids. The whole world will not sh*t the bed. We can handle it.

Olympe has a suitably vague and potentially dramatic origin story that you can play with. She could have been the daughter of anyone from a butcher to Louis XV depending on who you read, so take your pick, no history nerds can call you on it, you won’t get Ridley Scotted. Originally from the southwest of France, she came from a comfortable family who married her off to a caterer at the age of 17 against her will. She’d later write a semi-autobiographical novel called Mémoires de Madame de Valmont, and of this she said: “I was married to a man I did not love and who was neither rich nor well-born. I was sacrificed for no reason that could make up for the repugnance I felt for this man.” He certainly got the better deal, as her money enabled him to start his own business. I suppose then, it was a relief when within a couple of years he died. He possibly drowned, but he apparently just disappears from the record, so potentially you could even have Olympe digging a hole in the garden wearing a ballgown and again, you’re bullet proof. Knock yourselves out.  Wherever the inconvenient spouse went, he left her a widow with a baby son, and she was done with husbands, later referring to marriage as “the tomb of trust and love.” She was definitely not done with sex though. She’d just be getting it on her terms now….