Producer/screenwriter Jim White will be helming a staged table read with 10 actors for his screenplay that was inspired by a trove of love letters written by the sweetheart of a captured World War II GI and read by him 60 years later.
The table read for the romance/drama “Chet and Jeanne” Tuesday, Sept. 22 at DePaul’s downtown campus was organized by casting director Andrea Klunder of Mondo Machine.
The packet of 80 letters written in 1944 were discovered by
Lora Cruikshank of Milwaukee, daughter of Chet and Jeanne Sakwinski, amazingly found the packet of 80 letters hidden in the attic of her parents’ home after her mother’s death.
Jeanne had written the letters to Chet in December, 1944, not knowing that he had been captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and was being held prisoner in Bastogne, Belgium.
“The letters were being returned sealed and unopened, and the postman who kept delivering the returned mail kept telling my mother he was dead,” says Cruikshank. “But she never gave up believing he was alive. Five months later she received a letter from Dad.”
Cruikshank gave the fading cache to her father, now in his 90s and grieving for his wife of 60 years. “He read every one of those letters as though she were there, having a conversation with him.”
Feeling the her parents’ story would make a good movie, Cruikshank reached out to a writer friend, Chris Baumgart, who took her to a Chicago Screenwriters Network meeting. There, she met attorney Hal “Corky” Kessler who, in turn, introduced her to his screenwriting client, Jim White.
White, an award-winning producer/director, who will coproduce the movie with Cruikshank, has written two previous period scripts; one set during the 1921 Tulsa race riots and another about the Civil War Buffalo Soldiers.
With his own father having served in WWII, he had an affinity for the story.
Told in flashbacks between present day and 1944, the story is about Chet and Jeanne during wartime, the secret that’s been eating Chet all these years and Lora’s journey following in her father’s footsteps during the war, from where he landed on Utah Beach to a hamlet in Belgium where he was taken prisoner.
An Atlanta production company has already expressed interest in the script, White says.
Actors participating in the table read: Meg Thalken as Lora; Deann Baker, Jeanne; Peter Calandra, Chet; Matthew Johnsyon, Chet the soldier; David Besky, the narrator. Taking on multiple roles: Colton Schied; John McDonnell, Guy Wicke, Laura Ann Parry and Kara Leigh.
