A week or so after it was announced that a movie based on an article revolving around a McDonalds Monopoly scam would be developed with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, another article will be adapted into feature length form.
This one is Chris Lee‘s story for the Daily Beast titled When Prince Made A Chambermaid His Queen For A Day. Paramount Players has optioned the story and Elizabeth Banks plans to star in and produce the film, which will have the simplified title Queen For A Day.
Flora Greeson has just been hired to rewrite a first draft by Josh Stolberg, which will revolve around the chaos in 1986 that came about when Warner Bros. hatched a contest to draw attention to Prince‘s follow-up album to Purple Rain, Under The Cherry Moon.
The studio staged a ‘Win A Date With Prince’ contest at MTV, in which the 10,000th caller would win a date with the rockstar. The winner turned out to be Lisa Barber, a young woman from Wyoming who cleaned hotels for a living and was a big Motley Crue fan.
The movie is set to be inspired by this Cinderella-esque date, but will also be about how the event changed the lives of two very different women; the Manhattan PR executive responsible for the event’s success, and the shy, awkward contest winner, whose town becomes the unexpected nexus of all things Prince for one unforgettable night.
Reportedly, Prince will not be played by an actor, although his presence will linger throughout the film. Much of the focus will shift to the enormous effort it took to bring him to a small cowboy town to engage in not just a date, but a premiere of his latest film and a concert headlined by him, and how Barber dealt with her unexpected celebrity status.
Banks, who will next direct Charlie’s Angels, is reportedly not in line to direct this as well so the hunt will begin for a filmmaker to helm this quirky project. There’s a lot of moving parts here and it’ll be intriguing to see how this eventually all comes together.
#Peace.Love.Prince
