Bieber Entertainment Enterprises has acquired the rights to award-winning playwright Lionel Goldstein’s screenplay The Chinese General, marking the second project in the works about Morris Abraham Cohen (a.k.a. Two-Gun Cohen), the adventurous British aide de camp to China’s first modern president Dr. Sun Yet Sun.
Denis Bieber is producing the $45 million movie with Wayne Duband. The financing for the film is being assembled as a co-production between China, Australia and Canada. The project is out to a director and cast.
Last month, director
Doug Liman and producers
Rob Reiner and
Alan Greisman joined forces with Beijing Galloping Horse Film & TV Production to produce a competing drama about Two-Gun Cohen, with
Matt Brown set to pen the script.
Goldstein’s script is done. The English playwright’s credits include Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson, The Executioner.
“Lionel Goldstein developed this original screenplay over the past twenty years. The Chinese General tells the dramatic and exciting story of how Morris Cohen’s career became interwoven in the lives of the most important players in the formation of modern-day China,” Duband and Bieber said.
Morris Cohen also a close, trusted friend and protector of Madame Soong Ching Ling, famous, revered and iconic wife of Dr. Sun Yat Sen. Madame Soong Ching Ling became, in her own right, Vice President of the People’s Republic of China.
“This astonishing true story is evidence of the close and faithful friendship enjoyed between Morris Cohen and Madame Soong Ching Ling and is revealed by the inscription Madame Soong Ching Ling placed on Morris’s tombstone, in the Jewish cemetery in Manchester, England,” said Goldstein.
In addition to his entertainment and technology ventures, Bieber is a social activist who initiated and co-financed the concert, “The American Tribute to Vaclav Hazel and a Celebration of Democracy in Czechoslovakia,” held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine immediately after the Velvet Revolution in 1990. In addition, he obtained the support of President Clinton to get Sacagawea, the Native American princess’ image on the U.S. dollar coin.
