Spotted Turquoise Preps Oz Film ‘Wake Up Dead’ And U.S. Thriller ‘Hollow Point’

Don Groves is a Deadline contributor based in Sydney.

Garry Charny’s Spotted Turquoise Films is gearing up to shoot its first Australian film, Wake Up Dead, in mid-2013. The company also is developing U.S. thriller Hollow Point with U.S. producers Julie Richardson, whose credits include Collateral and the thrillers The Collector and The Collection, and Laura Heberton. Charny, who produced Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne in his former role as head of April Films, launched the Sydney-based production company earlier this year after co-founding Boost Media, an international media and sales revenue generating consultancy. Nick Parsons (Dead Heart, TV’s The Straits) is writing Wake Up Dead, which will star Alex Russell and Luke Ford. Russell will play a detective who investigates the death of a female student on campus, with Ford as a hard-bitten magazine editor who gets involved in the case. The female lead is yet to be announced. The director is Joel Kohn. Richardson will make her feature debut as writer-director on Hollow Point, the story of two cops, male and female, who investigate the kidnapping of American heiress Patty Hearst and her subsequent involvement in a series of bank robberies. Spotted Turquoise Films invested in Richardson’s Guarding Charlie, a short film set during the Vietnam War that was shot in Los Angeles. Based on the experiences of retired Sergeant Major Franklin Dennis Jones, it’s the saga of two marines who were asked to protect a North Vietnamese officer who had surrendered in 1968, an incident that triggered the Siege of Khe Sanh.