Big productions sometimes have small beginnings.
And it looks like the Vancouver-filmed YouTube series “The Haunting of Sunshine Girl” may be one of them.
The show, centered on a local teen who moves into a haunted house, was picked up this month for a major book and movie deal from The Weinstein Co. — the group that produced “Silver Linings Playbook,” “Django Unchained” and “The King’s Speech.”
The film will star Paige McKenzie, 20, who also stars in the YouTube series. It will include McKenzie’s mother, Mercedes Rose, and Vancouver director Nick Hagen as producers.
“This is what I’ve been working on for close to 15 years,” Hagen said of the deal. “The book’s set in Washington state, in a made-up town kind of based on Vancouver.”
He said he hopes the movie will film in the area, but that’s still up in the air, he said.
“The movie, we don’t have a lot of control over that, but I’d love it if it filmed in the Pacific Northwest,” Hagen said. “It’s Hollywood, though, and (the site selection is) really about film incentive deals.”
To get the attention of a company of Weinstein’s caliber is a real achievement for McKenzie, Rose and Hagen, who together own the film group Coat Tale Productions, they said.
“They’re pretty much the pinnacle,” Rose said of Weinstein. “In the film world, they’re pretty much the top.”
Coat Tale runs the Haunting of Sunshine Girl Network on YouTube at www.youtube.com/user/hauntedsunshinegirl. The network includes other Vancouver-filmed series such as “Zombie Ridge” and “The Screenprinters.”
Brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein founded Weinstein Co. in October 2005. Dimension Films is one of its subsidiaries. The brothers also founded Miramax Films in 1979.
“‘The Haunting of Sunshine Girl’ has all the ingredients to become a success on the screen and page, in the young adult world and beyond,” Bob and Harvey Weinstein said in a statement. “We were blown away by the talent of young Paige McKenzie, and the brilliant, spooky world she has brought to life with her warm, relatable protagonist, aptly named Sunshine.”
Production hasn’t yet started on the film, but the first few chapters of the book are ready, with a release date set for spring 2015 from Weinstein Books. The company hopes to turn it into a series based on Sunshine’s adventures.
Hagen, Rose and McKenzie partnered with young adult fiction writer Alyssa Sheinmel to create the first book, which will delve into Sunshine’s world when she moves from Texas to Washington shortly after turning 16.
“It’s very collaborative,” Rose said. “We really want to expand this universe. There’s only so much you can do on YouTube. We really wanted to show Sunshine at school, but we couldn’t film there. We definitely want to do many, many books.”
The deal actually came about through an odd set of circumstances, Rose added.
This past fall, McKenzie was in the “Pretty Amazing” competition sponsored by Seventeen Magazine, along with another woman who had the same first name.
Mollie Glick, a literary agent with Foundry Media and an the executive producer on the film, was looking for Paige Rawl, an HIV activist, when she came across McKenzie.
“She was looking for the other Paige, and she found me,” McKenzie said with a laugh. “So it worked out great.”
Glick pitched the Sunshine story to the Weinstein brothers, who loved the idea.
While the book and movie deal will likely keep McKenzie, Rose and Hagen busy, they also plan to keep going with the YouTube show that started everything.
“We’re trying to do mostly adventure-based episodes now, because we don’t want to conflict with any book storylines,” Rose said. “So they’ll be stand-alone adventures.”
The popular channel has racked up 65 million page views since it launched in 2010 and now has 120,000 subscribers.
Coat Tale is looking to expand the Sunshine network beyond the three main series. They’ve added an Oregon show called “Quest for Bigfoot” to the lineup, along with several smaller productions.
And they’re also looking for a bilingual actress between ages 18-30 to do a show in Spanish, Rose said. Anyone interested can contact her at castingoption@gmail.com
“We really want to expand the network as much as possible,” she said. “We’re loving it so much.”
Coat Tale is also finishing up a horror film titled “3” that’s set in the 1980s, and Hagen is working on a pilot for a network TV show, he said.
McKenzie said she’s thrilled with the opportunity to star in the Weinstein film. And so far, she isn’t nervous, she said.
“Not yet,” McKenzie said. “Maybe I will be, but all of this hasn’t really sunk in yet.”
