According to a couple of our trusted sources, singer Alicia Keys is set to produce and star in an adaptation of “The House At Sugar Beach”, based on the NY Times journalist Helene Cooper’s memoir.
The book is some pretty heady stuff, telling the story of Helene Cooper’s privileged Liberian childhood, which was cut brutally short by a bloody 1980 coup. The movie follows her family’s escape and survival, and 23 years later, Cooper’s return to her native country to find the foster sister that her family left behind. Here’s the synopsis from Publisher’s Weekly:
Journalist Cooper has a compelling story to tell: born into a wealthy, powerful, dynastic Liberian family descended from freed American slaves, she came of age in the 1980s when her homeland slipped into civil war. On Cooper’s 14th birthday, her mother gives her a diamond pendant and sends her to school. Cooper is convinced that somehow our world would right itself. That afternoon her uncle Cecil, the minister of foreign affairs, is executed. Cooper combines deeply personal and wide-ranging political strands in her memoir. There’s the halcyon early childhood in Africa, a history of the early settlement of Liberia, an account of the violent, troubled years as several regimes are overthrown, and the story of the family’s exile to America. A journalist-as-a-young-woman narrative unfolds as Cooper reports the career path that led her from local to national papers in the U.S. The stories themselves are fascinating, but a flatness prevails—perhaps one that mirror’s the author’s experience. After her uncle’s televised execution, Cooper does the same thing I would do for the rest of my life when something bad happens: I focus on something else. I concentrate on minutiae. It’s the only way to keep going when the world has ended.
Though set up through Keys’ production company, Big Pita, Little Pita, the project is in very early stages with no writer or director attached yet. And with Keys on tour at least through June we don’t see movement happening on this until the second half of 2010 at the earliest. That said, it’s a fascinating story and will undoubtedly be the strongest test yet of Keys’ acting abilities which have so far been seen in films like “Smokin’ Aces,” “The Nanny Diaries” and “The Secret Life Of Bees.”