‘Mission: Impossible III’s Stratton Leopold & ‘The Other Side Of The Wind’ Producer Dax Phelan Team On Irish Republican Prison Escape Series
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EXCLUSIVE: Veteran producer Stratton Leopold (Mission: Impossible III) and filmmaker Dax Phelan (The Other Side of the Wind) have teamed up to produce a new currently untitled limited series based on an infamous 19th-century prison escape known affectionately as The Catalpa Expedition.
Set in Ireland, the United States, and Australia during the 1860s and 1870s, the series will be based on the real-life plan members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood — a 19th-century republican group — made to free six political prisoners from a British penal colony in Western Australia while aboard the whaleship, The Catalpa. The writer, poet, and journalist John Boyle O’Reilly was among the political prisoners sent to a British penal colony in Australia.
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Phelan will write the pilot episode and produce alongside Leopold and Eric M. Klein. Terence E. Groves (Jasmine), who first brought the idea to Leopold, will serve as executive producer along with James Su (She’s Lost Control) and Benjamin Cheek.
Leopold recently produced The Neon Highway, which will be released theatrically later this year. Phelan recently adapted Neil White’s New York Times best-selling memoir, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts, for Leopold and co-produced Orson Welles’s long-lost final film, The Other Side of the Wind, for Netflix.
Klein’s recent credits include post management on They Call Me Magic (Apple+), Heist (Netflix), and the 2021 Oscar-winning short Two Distant Strangers (Netflix) for the post outlet, ɡlo͞o.
“As a filmmaker, I’m always on the lookout for true stories about the triumph of the human spirit over incredible odds,” Leopold said. “The story of the Fenians’ escape shows the power of human will to accomplish extraordinary things under the worst of circumstances.”
Phelan added: “This is one of the greatest escape stories that I’ve ever heard and, ironically, one of the least known. The more you learn about it and those involved, the better it gets.”
Phelan is represented by Daniel S. Passman at Gang, Tyre, Ramer, Brown, & Passman, and Lon Haber & Co.
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