Making It Happen...

We want to bring these works to the attention of a visionary producer or director. We picture in our mind's eye either a feature-length film, or even better, a series.

What are the components of a great cinematic historical saga? Consider the words of the San Jose Mercury-News reviewer of THE COURT OF THE LION, in comparing it to SHOGUN: "It is more successful in balancing its great events and personal stories, more tautly plotted, richer in character, and simply more poetic."

Those are the very elements: great events and personal stories, great plot, richness of character, poetic quality, and we have them in abundance—plus an exotic time and setting, all of it leavened with just the right seasonings of sex, violence and moral ambiguity. Though both COURT and IRON EMPRESS are based on true stories out of the annals of China's vast history, and in addition to our imaginations we drew on some actual written records—even some eyewitness accounts—truth can be far, far stranger than fiction. There were times when we thought we needed to tone down the truth, or else people would accuse us of implausibility! The world of T'ang Dynasty China is easily as fantastical as the parallel worlds of Westeros and Middle Earth—except that it was real.

We wrote THE COURT OF THE LION first, and a few years later IRON EMPRESS (then titled DECEPTION), but the action of IRON EMPRESS occurs about fifty years before the action of COURT. The protagonist of IRON EMPRESS, Wu Tse-tien, China’s only female emperor, was in fact the grandmother of COURT’s  Emperor Minghuang. The action of SHORE OF PEARLS occurs in a four-year interval in the action of IRON EMPRESS. Each of these titles alone would be a superb feature film; together, they span a century and provide historical continuity, plots within plots, vivid characters both high and low and endless intrigue enough for the sort of series audiences never forget:

Think Chinese "Game of Thrones."

                                                          \\...<{00}>...//