The film that closes out this year's Producer's Choice series at the New Orleans Museum of Art is, on its face, an odd choice for the man who produced it. Richard Gladstein has never been much of a Peter Pan fan. He produced Quentin Tarantino's early films, "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction," and the Bourne spy thriller; he had already been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar for "The Cider House Rules." A period drama about J.M. Barrie and the family who inspired the boy who wouldn't grow up was not an obvious next step.
What drew him in was the play. Allan Knee's 1998 work "The Man Who Was Peter Pan" had been staged off-Broadway, and Gladstein saw in it something bigger than a literary origin story. "I was drawn to it, because at its core, it's all about where one finds inspiration," he told NOLA.com. That is the thread he will pull on October 20, when "Finding Neverland" screens at NOMA's Lapis Center for the Arts and Gladstein sits down afterward with Meryl Poster, the producer who curates the series, for a conversation about how the film got made.
The screening begins at 6:30 p.m., with doors opening at 6. Tickets are $10 for NOMA members and $15 for general admission, available through noma.org. Seating is first-come, first-served, and Café NOMA will serve popcorn, light bites, wine, beer and specialty cocktails before and during the film.
The Lapis Center itself is a relatively new chapter in the museum's history. The renovated auditorium, courtyard and café opened after a renovation that began in January 2020, funded by the Zemurray Foundation, with state-of-the-art surround sound, theatrical lighting and seating for up to 360 people. Its name comes from the Latin word lapis, meaning stone or marker. Lining its walls is Enrique Alférez's monumental plaster relief mural "Symbols of Communication," completed in 1967 for the lobby of the New Orleans Public Library and one of the most significant works by an artist who shaped the city's public art for decades. It is a fitting room for a series built on the idea that cinema belongs alongside the visual arts.
Poster's path to curating it runs through some of the most successful films of the 1990s and 2000s. She was co-president of production at Miramax Films, a senior studio executive overseeing development and production, and later president of television at The Weinstein Company before founding her own company, Superb Entertainment. She moved to New Orleans in September 2022; in a NOMA Magazine questionnaire she recalled that her first visit to the museum came soon after, when visiting friends prompted a trip to the Besthoff Sculpture Garden. "I was blown away by the collection and have come back many times since," she said. The Producer's Choice series grew out of that relationship, pairing modern classics with conversations with the actors, writers and craftspeople who made them.
For "Finding Neverland," Poster's fingerprints are all over the finished film, and not only as an executive. Gladstein has told the story of casting the pivotal role of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies's mother, Emma du Maurier, who becomes guardian to the boys alongside Barrie after Sylvia's death, just as "Peter Pan" reaches the stage. He had two names in mind: Joan Plowright and Judi Dench. "But I have to tell you, it was Meryl who didn't agree with either of those suggestions, and instead wanted Julie Christie," Gladstein said. Christie, who won the Best Actress Oscar in 1965 for "Darling," said yes. It is the kind of decision the post-screening conversation is built to unpack.
The film, directed by Marc Forster from a screenplay by David Magee, stars Johnny Depp as Barrie and Kate Winslet as Sylvia, with Dustin Hoffman as the American producer Charles Frohman and Radha Mitchell as Barrie's wife, Mary. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 4, 2004, and opened in the United States that November, going on to earn roughly $116.8 million worldwide against a $25 million budget. At the 77th Academy Awards it was nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor for Depp, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing and Best Costume Design, among other categories; Jan A.P. Kaczmarek won for Best Original Score. The National Board of Review named it Best Picture. Gladstein shared a Producers Guild nomination for the film with Nellie Bellflower.
Knee's play, and by extension the film, took liberties with the historical record, and did so openly. Knee described his approach as a fairytale version of the making of a fairytale. He put four of Sylvia's five sons on stage to keep the cast manageable, and he made her a widow when in fact she was still married when she met Barrie, sidestepping the complications of that marriage. What remains true is the essential shape of the story: a writer stuck in a creative rut, his latest play a modest success, who meets a woman and her boys in Kensington Gardens and finds in them the device that would keep children young forever.
That is the material Gladstein will be talking through on a Tuesday evening in City Park, in a room named for a stone and lined with a mural about communication, in a city that Poster now calls home. The film runs 101 minutes. The conversation, presumably, runs as long as the audience wants it to.