Treatment for the TV Series and Film Rebecca West – Black Lamb, Gray Falcon

Srđan Koljević

Authors

Srđan Koljević Faculty of Drama Arts, University of Belgrade

Abstract

A Note on the Treatment

The idea that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West’s voluminous travel (and not just travel) book, could provide an exciting starting point for a TV series, dates back to 1988/9, when some fragments from this book, translated by my father, Nikola Koljevic, were published in the Književne novine review. The Chief Director of Televizija Sarajevo, Slobodan Terzic, was interested in initiating this project as a coproduction between JRT and BBC. The negotiations did not go far, apart from a meeting I had with the editors at BBC in 1989, during the summer that I (then still a student of dramaturgy) spent in London working illegally as a cook in a restaurant. In these circumstances, which were soon about to change, in our country at least, a project of this scope could not be carried out.

In the middle of the nineties – when Rebecca West’s book gained new, global, popularity – Terzic, now Head of Drama Programmes at Televizija Beograd, contacted me again, with a proposal to reinitiate the co-production, but it nevertheless remained too ambitious for TV Beograd's logistic and other capacities.

This treatment was written in 2010, in English, when the third, and so far the most resolute, initiative to realize this film was put forward. The producer Gabriela Tana, who was, at the time, producing Ralph Finnes' film Coriolanus in Belgrade, became intersted in the project through Terzic and Anđelka Vlaisavljevic.

Gabriela Tana managed to obtain (for a limited period only) the rights for a screen adaptation of the book, and hired me to write a treatment for it. Her plan was to get either the BBC or Channel 4 interested in doing a mini series or a film... For now, that's the end of the story about this project. Maybe some day the story will continue.

In writing this treatment, I used, apart from the book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, the excellent biography of Rebecca West, written by Victoria Glendinning, as well as diverse sources on Stanislav Vinaver (her guide Constantine in the book) and the Yugoslav literary, social and political scene of the time.