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Long BeachThe Queen Mary is ready for her close-up.
The aging ship, long a regional-but-fading star attraction, has a chance to reclaim some of her global fame, with a trilogy of horror movies in the works based on the former cruise liner’s legendary ghost stories. A business partnership, with Orange County production company Imagination Design Works at the front, has acquired the film rights for the Queen Mary’s multiple stories, officials announced this week.
The announcement represents a do-over for Imagination Design Works, after the coronavirus pandemic scuttled efforts to make a Queen Mary movie last spring, said Brett Tomberlin, cofounder and president of Production/Acquisitions for the company.
The production now seems like a go. The partnership obtained COVID-19 insurance, film sets are being built, the trilogy has a director and the first film’s lead actress is lined up.
“We think now is a good time (to make a movie),” Tomberlin said. “There’s not much out there now. With luck the theaters will be opening again around the time we’re ready, and we can go to the streaming services too.”
And Tomberlin made clear that — unlike Norma Desmond, in “Sunset Boulevard,” waiting for a comeback that will never come — the Queen Mary will be the star.
“The Queen Mary is an amazing ship,” he said. “It’s one of the most popular haunted spots in the world.
“There’s something about it; it’s really the unsinkable ship, considering how much it has gone through, how many times they’ve threatened to take it apart,” Tomberlin added. “It’s still there.”
The biggest obstacle last year was the lack of COVID-19 insurance, Tomberlin said.
“We tried to get out in front of it,” Tomberlin said Monday, March 1, from Laguna Beach. “But you needed COVID insurance, and you know how many companies were offering COVID insurance? Zero.”
But they have it now — and are moving forward.
Much of the production will have a British bent. Financial backer Rocket Science is a film and television studio based in England.
Irish filmmaker Gary Shore has signed on for the trilogy and came up with a premise for the movies after visiting the Queen Mary; he will write the scripts with Stephen Oliver and Tom Vaughan. Shore’s debut film, “Dracula Untold,” had a $70 million budget and grossed $217 million in the United States, according to the movie’s website.
The first Queen Mary movie’s lead role, meanwhile, will go to Alice Eve, an English-American actress who works on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Her credits include “She’s Out of My League,” “Men in Black 3” and “Star Trek Into Darkness.”
The Queen Mary itself, of course, is British. The ship was built on a Scottish river in the 1930s and during its decades of service bore the prefix RMS, an acronym for Royal Mail Service. It also served as a troopship during World War II and continued as a cruise liner until being retired in 1967.
The ship has been in Long Beach since then.
Tomberlin declined to discuss plot details, but did say the overarching storyline will revolve around the Queen Mary’s first-class swimming pool, which is often considered the most haunted spot on the ship.
The budget for shooting the first “Queen Mary” is between $10.5 million and $12.5 million. And while a great deal of preliminary work has been done on LED screens and other sets for filming in England, Tomberlin said, there are plans to shoot aboard the Queen Mary sometime in May.
The ship, owned by Long Beach, has been a location for multiple movies and television shows, including a 1966 Frank Sinatra vehicle called Assault on a Queen,” about treasure hunters trying to rob the ship’s passengers.
Tomberlin said he is very familiar with the Queen Mary, and believes it will be a great star for the trilogy.
“This isn’t going to be a slasher horror movie,” Tomberlin said. “We want it to be an elegant thriller — befitting the Queen.”
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