Joseph Mazzello, best known for “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Jurassic Park,” will headline “A Grim Life,” a supernatural thriller set inside Los Angeles’ infamous Cecil Hotel. Hong Kong outfit Cappu Films has boarded international sales, with the project unveiled at the Tokyo International Film Festival’s TIFFCOM market.
Joseph Mazzello (Credits: Variety)
Written and directed by Francesco Lucente, the film casts Mazzello as Tom, a down-on-his-luck filmmaker who pays the bills scrubbing toilets and can’t stop reworking the one script he has. His life changes when a friend steers him toward “Bose,” a lost silent picture from 1931 — and Tom’s hunt for an artistic breakthrough drags him toward a dark secret lurking inside the hotel.
Joseph Mazzello Enters the Cecil Hotel
The Cecil Hotel is one of cinema’s most loaded settings. Opened in 1924, the downtown Los Angeles landmark built a decades-long reputation for murders, suicides and unexplained deaths — most notoriously the 2013 death of Canadian student Elisa Lam, whose disappearance in the hotel’s water tank spawned endless true-crime fascination.
Mazzello, whose credits also include HBO’s “The Pacific,” is a fitting lead for the meta premise: a struggling artist chasing a lost film inside a building where reality has a way of blurring. The project reunites Lucente with Cappu Films after the fantasy feature “Starbright” and ahead of his upcoming fantasy adventure “Sinbad.”
Cappu Films Doubles Down at TIFFCOM
Cappu Films is having a busy Tokyo market. Alongside “A Grim Life,” the company sold French action title “Red Bird” to Kinologistika LLC for the CIS region and took on international sales for the D.C. indie romance “Step Back, Doors Closing.” The Hong Kong outfit’s catalog spans horror, action, fantasy and arthouse fare alongside library titles from Hong Kong’s Golden Era.
With TIFFCOM buyers now circling, “A Grim Life” joins a long line of Cecil Hotel screen stories — but few have paired the location with a filmmaker’s creative obsession quite like this.
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Source: Variety — read the full story there.
