MIPTV 2012: Madison Dylan to Add Girl Power to ‘Femme Fatales Presents: Foul Ploy’

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Cinemax Casts Lead in 'Femme Fatales'

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Femme Fatales star Madison Dylan will give the big screen an estrogen injection in Foul Ploy, a movie version of the popular men’s magazine, producers confirmed in Cannes at MIPTV.

The film will be based on the magazine that inspired Cinemax’s sexy anthology TV show and will be a thriller inspired by movies like Charade and To Catch A Thief, which was filmed in Cannes.

Foul Ploy, which will shoot this spring in Los Angeles and Barcelona, is the first in a series of feature films based on the magazine.

International distributor eOne has begun pre-sales for the film as it continues to shop seasons one and two of the series at the international marketplace. The creators of the Femme Fatales franchise Steve Kriozere and Mark Altman were in Cannes to promote the show, escorted by their entourage of the leggy female stars of the 27 x 30 minute series.

The second season of Femme Fatales has sold to several territories already including Italy, Latin America, Russia and Turkey, and, Altman hopes, France. “I don’t want to fly home without France!” he confessed.

The show follows strong, sexy women as they find their way through dangerous situations in stand-alone episodes. The girl-powered anthology series is inspired by film noir, pulp fiction and classic mysteries.

“The anthology show is sort of a dead genre. We’re huge ‘Twilight Zone’ so we saw this as an opportunity to put a new spin on the anthology genre,” Altman said, adding: “What’s unique about our show is that it takes place in a shared universe so the characters can occur from one episode to another.”

Altman and Kriozere are self-confessed film noir geeks who have taken their love of the genre to the show. “It pays homage to the stuff we grew up on that we loved. There’s an interesting hybrid of our own sensibilities, pulp fiction and comic books and graphic novels in the DNA of the series,” Altman said.

The second season of the Femme Fatalesseries premieres on May 25 and will feature more beautiful women in more dangerous situations. Altman revealed to THRthat the new season will end with a one-hour season finale called Librathat will star Jeff Fahey, Steve Railsback, Adam Huss and Betsy Rue based on a comic book character created by Bob Layton of Iron Man fame.

“This has been a terrifically satisfying experience,” Altman said of working with HBO. “Cinemax has been doing a great job of rebranding. It’s nice to be part of that rebranding effort and we are a very strong arrow in their quiver, so the show has gotten a lot of attention.”

Sexy women in dangerous situations wasn’t a hard sell to the network.

“It was the easiest pitch I’ve done in my life. I think I sold this in about 10 minutes,” Altman said of approaching HBO with the idea, adding that the fact that “the cost-benefit ratio is very high” for the low budget series certainly helped matters.

Plus, Femme Fatales is also a transmedia powerhouse. “We own the magazine, we do the TV series, comic books, now ‘Femme Fatales’ movies based on the magazine,” Altman said adding: “The Femme Fatales brand is a cliché of transmedia, but we’ll also be able to exploit it among many different platforms.”