[extropy-chat] Gilgamesh Movie?

[Amara Graps]

The following came from a 2003 story. Does anyone here know what is
the status of the Gilgamesh movie?

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http://www.baghdadmuseum.org/film.htm


Beni Atoori is a Hollywood filmmaker and President of Stonelock Pictures
in Los Angeles. He is producing the ancient epic of Gilgamesh for
theatrical release, starring Michael Madsen, Omar Sharif, Billy Zane and
Robert Davi. A cultural partnership has been formed between this
production company and the Baghdad Museum Project, bringing to our
efforts the visualization resources of a motion picture that recreates
life in ancient Mesopotamia. The filmmaking process itself will explore
how culture speaks to modern dilemmas.

Stonelock Pictures is also the Baghdad Museum Project's first corporate
sponsor, pledging $1.5 million toward our outreach campaign for
community cultural development. This will be an omnimedia campaign,
involving television, radio, print, internet and live events.

Gilgamesh will be directed by Academy Award winner Roger Christian, who
earned an Oscar for his innovative work as Art Director on the original
Star Wars film, A New Hope. As Art Director and Production Designer, he
went on to apply his eye for convincing detail and "used realism" to the
original Alien film, for which he received an Academy Award nomination.
His film, The Dollar Bottom, meanwhile had won an Academy Award for Best
Dramatic Short.

Roger then wrote and directed the medieval fantasy Black Angel, and has
since helmed eight more motion pictures including the critically
acclaimed Nostradamus starring Julia Ormond, F. Murray Abraham and
Rutger Hauer. The historical biography, produced for $4.2 million,
earned $89 million worldwide before video and DVD sales.

Roger recently again worked alongside his old colleague George Lucas,
this time as Lucas' second unit director on the Star Wars prequel, The
Phantom Menace. After 20 years, he returned not only to the world of
Star Wars but to location shooting in the North African deserts, where
he had helped bring the first Star Wars film to life and where he will
now oversee the construction of Gilgamesh's domain, the ancient city of
Uruk.

"I like the Baghdad Museum Project because of my own Assyrian heritage,"
says Stonelock Pictures' Beni Atoori. "I feel like I'm doing my part to
help preserve the Assyrians' cultural property," he says. The production
of Gilgamesh has been his lifelong ambition and passion. Now production
is slated to begin at the end of summer in Morocco. "We're taking
mankind's oldest known written epic and making it a living document,"
says Atoori.

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Amara