| Home | Recordings | Documentaries | Novels | Musicals |
| Lyrics/MP3's | Faces | Contact | Guestbook |
|
| "1st day of shooting LEARNING TO DRIVE - Action! - OMG! #BenKingsley and #Patricia Clarkson are speaking my lines!! #luckyme" @SarahKernochan August 14, 2013 | LEARNING TO DRIVE written by Sarah Kernochan |
 | In August 2013, Sarah's feature script LEARNING TO DRIVE, based on a New Yorker story by Katha Pollitt, went before cameras, starring Ben Kinglsey and Patricia Clarkson. Read more about it here:
Deadline Hollywood Article by Sarah in WGAW Written By |  |
 | All I Wanna Do Originally titled "The Hairy Bird". Original screenplay by Sarah Kernochan | Australia  |
All I Wanna Do had a difficult birth, overcoming the inertia of an industry which traditionally has had reservations about women running things, as well as for picayune reasons, like the tempest surrounding the original title --- "The Hairy Bird" --- which was deemed offensive and problematic by Miramax. In Canada, the film is called "Strike". Only the Australian release retains the original title. This film is Sarah's debut feature as director.
|
Other All I Wanna Do Links:
All I Wanna Do Home Page Brief article at the Rosemary Hall website, the all girl boarding school Sarah attended. |
| Impromptu Screenplay by Sarah Kernochan
Starring: Judy Davis, Hugh Grant, Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters, Julian Sands, Emma Thompson, Georges Corraface, Anton Rodgers, and Ralph Brown In the this film, the ball-busting nineteenth century French novelist George Sand sets her sights on the frail composer Frederic Chopin, pursuing him relentlessly. The harder she tries, the further he recedes, and the treachery of friends doesn't make her mission any easier. This is a witty tale of two opposite characters who come together as lovers, though the impossibilities seem endless. Kernochan long nourished a serious passion for Chopin's music, but when she read an account of his 10-year relationship with George Sand, she felt this great romance was a potentially funny story. Here was a mannish woman pursuiung a womanish man, and at every turn the gender roles were reversed. When writing some of the romantic scenes, she even wrote the action and dialogue as befitted a man courting a woman, and then simply switched the names! Upon completing the script, she gave it to her husband James Lapine to direct. Among others, he cast the then-unknown Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson in key roles, a bit of prescient casting which brought the film to a wider audience once those two actors' stars had risen. Now it enjoys an international cult following which has grown further since its re-release on DVD by MGM. Available on DVD at Amazon.com Download the Entire Script »» impromptu.pdf - (215K) Impromptu Poster at Movie Goods |  |
|
Films in which Sarah Kernochan is a writer:
|
 | Dancers
Herbert Ross (Director)
Starring: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alessandra Ferri, Leslie Browne, Thomas Rall, Lynn Seymour This was an odd assignment for Kernochan. She was to write a mirror story around the ballet "Giselle" and director Herbert Ross cautioned her not to write a lot of dialogue, and certainly no long speeches, because the movie was to star ballet dancers who could not be counted upon to act. The result was a 50 page script (leaving room for all the screen time devoted to sheer dancing) with nearly every scene under-written to a degree unnatural to Kernochan. She did, however, prevail with one long speech for Baryshnikov. He required 17 takes to get through it without flubbing the words! The film was meant to be somewhat light and comic, with a bittersweet ending, but whatever comedy was present in the script was lost to the director's frame of mind. His wife, the great ballerina Nora Kaye, was dying of cancer throughout the shoot and post production. She had wanted very badly to do this last ballet project (following up "The Turning Point" which Ross made with her). She lapsed into final unconsciousness before the film was finished. So there is a rueful, sorrowful pace and tone to this film which was supposed to have been fun.
|
 | What Lies Beneath
Claire: Michelle Pfeiffer Kernochan wrote the original script for this film for Steven Spielberg. The premise of an empty-nest couple and a female ghost was meant to resemble his "CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND" -- a realistic journey about making contact with the "other side," full of awe and wonderment as well as chills. Spielberg ultimately opted to do another movie instead, and the script was reworked for Robert Zemeckis as a horror movie. Kernochan decided to take only a story credit because the final version ranged so far afield from her own script, which had been partly based on her own close encounters with a ghost in her house. |
 | Sommersby Starring: Richard Gere, Jodie Foster, Bill Pullman, James Earl Jones, Lanny Flaherty "This film was written as a remake of the French classic tragedy THE RETURN OF MARTIN GUERRE, reset in the post-Civil War south. A soldier returns from that conflict to rejoin his wife on his devastated plantation. He seems much changed by his war experiences -- so changed that he may not even be the man he says he is! Kernochan was brought in to rewrite Nicholas Meyer's script as the film neared production. Jodie Foster was uncommitted because her role was weak. Kernochan not only reconceived her role but solved many confusing story points, leading to a shared screenplay credit." |
 | 9 1/2 Weeks Director: Adrian Lyne Adrian Lyne's film, based on a novel of the same name, tracked a sado-masochistic love affair. Fraught with production problems, including the loss of its American financing just weeks before commencement of principal photography, Kernochan was brought in to do a quickie rewrite over a single weekend. One rewrite led to another until she had written a third of the script and won a shared screenplay credit. She claims however that she wrote none of the infamous sex scenes except the refrigerator food free-for-all -- which she says amounted to no more than "coming up with a menu." |