CHAMBERS STREET STOP

Proposal for a Foto-Roman Series

CONCEPT

Foto novelas were once a flourishing art form popular in Latin America and Japan.  They were essentially soap opera graphic novels, told not with hand-drawn images but with black & white photos, printed cheaply on newsprint paper.  They were more about the melodrama than about the image.

Foto Roman  proposes to revitalize this lost art form as a series of high-end photographic books equally about the quality of the image as the story.

Each book will be a creative collaboration between a provocative photographer and an equally provocative writer - a fiction writer, a screenwriter/director, a graphic novelist.  Imagine a story told in images by, say, Steven Soderbergh and Gregory Crewdson.  Or Joan Didion and Lauren Greenfield.  Candace Bushnell and David LaChapelle.  Philip Gourevitch and Antonin Kratochvil.

Foto Roman would range across all genres, photographically and literarily.  Pop.  Reportage.  Romance.  Erotica.  Comedy.  Melodrama.  The tone, visually and verbally, would be up to the photographer-writer team.

Under the series editors' guidance, collaborators would have unlimited artistic freedom within the constraints of their budget (and perhaps a page range).

Conceived to launch the series, Chambers Street Stop is a romance that takes an unexpectedly dark turn on the subways of New York.  Told with sparing narration, it will explore the full design potential of the form - fine-art quality photos married to the visual panache of the graphic novel layout.

Whether a single photo spread over facing pages, or a sequence of vertically cropped narrow panels atop a cinemascope-like horizontal photo, the book will maintain the photographic integrity of each image:  all text would be laid out beneath selected image panels, using no talk or thought bubbles

The stories would be shot like a film production, but without sync sound.  For example, Chambers Street Stop was shot with a digital 35mm camera, in available light, on location (principally the New York City subways), over eleven nights, with a male and female lead, three featured extras, and a handful of background extras. 

MEDIA

Chambers Street Stop is designed as the initial offering for two series:

As a line of art-quality photo-novels, under the series title "FOTO ROMAN."

As a line of short ghost stories, "OTHER WORLDS."

BOOK FORM

FOTOROMAN would be done as up-market art books, collaborations between cutting-edge Photographers from the arenas of fashion, photo-journalism, erotica, etc; and Writers or Writer-Directors from the arenas of fiction, graphic novels, movies, and television. 

OTHER WORLDS would be in graphic novel format but printed on glossy paper, to be sold in comic-book and book stores. 

In a content-starved entertainment world, we see three other types of media for exploiting OTHER WORLDS..

DVD

Produced for DVD format as animated slide shows, with the addition of a music score track and a spoken-voice track.

INTERNET

A dedicated website, where fans could download excerpts and find out about upcoming releases.  Select images would be offered as wallpaper downloads.

DOWNLOADS

OTHER WORLDS would be made available on an episodic basis, day by day through the week for each tale, for downloading on Ipods and cell phones.  The goal:  to create buzz and anticipation by concluding each episode as a cliffhanger.  Target partners are:  Apple; AOL; Yahoo; Google; MSN; Cingular; Sprint; Verizon; T-Mobile.

MOVIE RIGHTS

While these photographic stories are not themselves movies, there will be some that, due to originality of conception and verve of execution, would engender followings leading to movie development.  We see the artist-creators and the publisher sharing in the sale of movie rights.