Alert AustenBlog Reader Cinthia of the JAcastellano mailing list writes to tell us about a not-so-new-anymore Jane Austen-themed Whit Stillman project, WINCHESTER RACES, brought to her attention by a poster on the mailing list.

Then, in Dec 2003, Adam Dawtrey reported the following in his London Eye column:

Five years after his last movie, “The Last Days of Disco,” American writer-director Whit Stillman is developing a Jane Austen project with Brit producer Stephen Evans. Paris-based Stillman, who first found fame with his Austen-esque comedies of preppy manners “Metropolitan” and “Barcelona,” is adapting two unfinished Austen novels, “The Watsons” and “Sanditon,” into a single script, titled “Winchester Races.”

His script merges the character of Emma Watson, a girl returning to her family after a long absence being brought up by her aunt, and that of Charlotte Hayward from “Sanditon,” an attractive country girl taken up by a family of comically optimistic real-estate speculators.

Now that seems more like it. Will it happen? If you have any information, don’t heistate to pass it on. I plan on updating this site more frequently from now on.

It seems Stillman has hold harboured ambitions to produce a period piece. During the rounds of publicity following the Last Days of Disco release he told the LA times, “My next film is probably going to be an 18th century drama set in the South. Lots of horses.” He told Salon, “It’s going to be a historical adventure film, which I hope to make for a low budget, set during the Revolution with Whigs versus Tories. I think it’s time we had a good Whig hero in American cinema.” Elsewhere, Stillman has called the proposed film “my funny swashbuckler” and a “sort of Zorro of the American Revolution,” and said that it will be set in (depending on the interview) the Carolinas in 1780 or Texas in the 1840’s. All of which means? He hadn’t started writing it yet!

We haven’t heard about this project before either, and there hasn’t been anything about it since, but we don’t think it’s quite dead in the water, either:

Whatever story he writes, we can be certain that it will take a while. As he told the AFF, “I would say three years, basically. It’s not as if you’re working on it the whole time. But I think when you start thinking about it seriously. So from when I start thinking about it seriously to when I finish it’s about three years.”

Now there’s something fun to think about! Thanks for the link, Cinthia.