Gravitas Acquires ‘Exposing Muybridge’ Doc On Pioneering Photographer – Deadline

EXCLUSIVE: Gravitas Ventures is saying “Yup” to a documentary about an artist referenced in Nope.

The company has acquired North American rights to Exposing Muybridge, an award-winning movie exploring the life and career of Eadweard Muybridge, an English-born, American-based photographer identified for his pioneering movement research. Gravitas will launch the documentary, directed by Marc Shaffer, tomorrow on Digital HD, cable and satellite tv for pc VOD, Blu-ray and DVD.

Muybridge’s work has been thrust entrance and heart this summer season courtesy of Jordan Peele’s horror-sci fi function Nope. The photographer’s “Plate Number 626,” a movement research of a race horse ridden by a Black jockey, figures prominently within the field office hit.

Exposing Muybridge, in the meantime, boasts Hollywood connections of its personal. Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman, an avid Muybridge fan and collector, is featured within the documentary, together with historians of movie and pictures, a museum curator, a wet-plate photographer and others.

Muybridge was born in England in 1830 and immigrated to the U.S. on the age of 20. He was one of many first to {photograph} Yosemite; not solely that, “He made the first photographs of winemaking in Northern California, produced the first photographs of native Tlingit people and of Southeast Alaska… and his photographs of Central America are widely considered the most important early images of the region,” as famous in a launch from Gravitas.

But his movement research and early work in cinematic projection are what he’s finest identified for at present.

“Eadweard Muybridge changed the world with his camera,” Shaffer mentioned in a press release. “That would be reason enough to make a documentary, but his story is so much more than that. He led a fascinating, dramatic life, and one full of delicious surprises.”

Among these surprises—Muybridge’s acquittal in a homicide trial by which he was accused of killing his spouse’s lover.

“Mischievous, resilient, deceitful, proud—Muybridge was a complicated man,” the discharge from Gravitas mentioned. “His personal story is as melodramatic as his professional one is distinguished, imbued with ambition and success, loss and betrayal, even the cold-blooded killing of a romantic rival.”

Earlier this year, Shaffer gained the Writers Guild of America Award for his screenplay for Exposing Muybridge. The movie is produced by Shaffer, Serginho Roosblad, and Elisabeth Haviland James; James additionally edited the movie. Executive producers are Nion McEvoy and Leslie Berriman; Dana O’Keefe serves as co-executive producer.

Gravitas Ventures’ Bill Guentzler, senior director of acquisitions, negotiated the deal on behalf of the company, with Cinetic negotiating on behalf of Shaffer.

Shaffer is a two-time nominee for the News and Documentary Emmy Awards. His credit embody 2014’s Broken Dreams: The Boeing 787, episodes of the documentary collection Frontline and National Geographic Explorer, and the 2013 function doc American Jerusalem: Jews and the Making of San Francisco.