Famed magazine editor Graydon Carter has launched the full-scale production company Par Avion Pictures, in partnership with writer and former Vanity Fair and Air Mail editor Harrison Vail.
Emmy and Peabody winner Carter marked the announcement out of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the site of many Gatsby-esque parties he’s hosted for global power players over the years.
Par Avion will develop projects across narrative and non-fiction formats, with “a particular focus on literary adaptation, biography and the cultural and intellectual history of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic,” the principals told Variety.
Graydon and Vail have already baked an ambitious slate, starting with a documentary feature about Christopher Hitchens – the author and polemicist published often during Carter’s 25-year reign at Vanity Fair. HBO is on board to release the project, a co-production with Oscar winner Alex Gibney (“Taxi to the Dark Side”) and John Battsek’s Ventureland (“Beckham”). Also in unscripted, Par Avion is working with Jemima Khan’s Instinct Productions on a series exploring the 600-year history of Eton College, the most prestigious of private schools that has educated kings, prime ministers, poets and spies.
The narrative slate is led by “Jet Set,” a series adaptation based on Nicholas Foulkes’ book “Swans: Legends of the Jet Society.” Par Avian has set Frank Spotnitz (“The Man in the High Castle”) and Nicholas Meyer (“Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”) as screenwriters, covering a golden age of a high-flying socialites from 1948 to 1973, tracing the intertwined lives of characters for whom everything was possible and nothing, ultimately, was enough. Foulkes has previously name-checked figures like Aristotle Onassis, Stavros Niarchos, Babe Paley and Gloria Guinness as subjects.
On deck is also a feature adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s memoir “A Moveable Feast,” to be penned by Scott Z. Burns (“The Bourne Ultimatum”). The prolific Burns will reimagine the memoir as an intimate double portrait of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald: their rivalry, tenderness toward each other and the city that made and unmade them both – Paris. The film will be developed in concert with the board of Hemingway Limited, on behalf of Ernest Hemingway’s estate.
Finally, Par Avion is producing the video-forward podcast “The Proust Conversation,” harnessing Carter’s editorial sensibility from his magazine days. The Proust Questionnaire, the static back page of Vanity Fair’s book for decades, will inspire interviews with a diverse set of public figures and will be filmed at the homes of subjects.
“I’ve been producing documentaries, largely for HBO, for a quarter of a century,” said Carter. “And Par Avion is a continuation of all of that. The great honor here is to work with incredibly talented filmmakers and to bring to the screen the sorts of people and stories that fascinated me during my years at Vanity Fair.”
Vail added that Par Avion is “a home for stories about ambition, appetite, vanity, intellect, style, power, and occasionally, very good manners disguised as very bad behavior.”
Carter was the founder of the satirical monthly Spy and newsletter Air Mail. He previously contributed to Time and Life magazines. He has produced more than a dozen documentaries, including “Public Speaking” from director Martin Scorsese, “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” the Nora Ephron doc “Everything is Copy” and “Ask E. Jean.”
Vail is a New York-based writer, editor and producer who began his career at Vanity Fair under Carter, where he served as director of communications and wrote the magazine’s party column and cultural features. The pair reunited at Air Mail, where Vail was head of communications and film & TV. Vail is a partner at Gravity Strategic Partners, a New York-based advisory firm.
Par Avion is repped by Gersh.
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