Seven Sisters the Movie
Most movies start with a book, but the book of Seven Sisters started out as a screenplay.
I pounded out the screenplay of Seven Sisters in 18 months and found that it was close to 300 pages long. That's one minute of screen time per page, and if you do the math, you're talking a 5-hour movie. So I cut and cut and cut until I had 240 pages. Now I was down to a 4-hour movie!
Most Mormon filmmakers don't want to do an expensive, four-hour, historical epic/saga, with an 1863 three-masted sailing ship that crosses the Atlantic Ocean with 800 extras, in period costumes, and has sets of the London and New York Docks, and a rather diabolical storm along the way.
After getting the screenplay into the hands of several LDS directors, producers, and rich folk, I could see that it wasn't going to be made into a movie any time soon.
Then I started to get the impression that I ought to turn this screenplay into a book. That way, I could write as many pages as I wanted and could put the scenes back in that I hated taking out of the screenplay in the first place.
After writing sporadically for two years, whenever I had the time and the inclination, I published Seven Sisters: the Voyage on November 10, 2008.
I thought I was finished--but guess what? I had so many requests to find out if the Seven Sisters made it to Utah--and what happened to them crossing America that I wrote a sequel! Seven Sisters: Overland Trek, published in 2014.
Now the story was complete. But wait! I had one screenplay about the first third of the story, but not the last two thirds. So I have been writing screenplays the last two years, and I just finished two more--making a very nice trilogy of screenplays for someone to produce.
So if you want to read an historical epic saga that is a cross between Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Master and Commander, and Westward the Women, you'll find it in my two books, Seven Sisters: the Voyage and Seven Sisters: Overland Trek, available at amazon.com.
And hopefully someone will want to make this great story--based on true events-- into a movie--or three--and produce the next big franchise, blockbuster, epic saga that will come to a theater near you--very soon!
Stay tuned, Friends.
Ta Pip,
Carolyn Hart Bennett
Rexburg, Idaho
