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Love in the Time of Cholera: On location, out on a limb

CARTAGENA , Colombia: He made Hugh Grant a floppy-haired trans-Atlantic star and teenage Harry Potter a screen hero. Now British director Mike Newell faces the greatest challenge of his career: bringing a masterwork of 20th-century Latin American fiction to Hollywood from a land better known for drugs and guerrillas. Newell just wrapped filming for "Love in the Time of Cholera," the first English-language screen adaptation of a work by Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel García Márquez. From the two-year struggle to acquire film rights from the notoriously protective author to the commercially risky casting of foreign lead actors to crises in filming on location, the making of the movie has been anything but easy.

Then again, neither were the 51 years, nine months, and four days that lead character Florentino Ariza famously waited in the novel for his true love. In the end, it was worth it for Ariza, and Newell and Hollywood producer Scott Steindorff are betting their travails will pay off in the authenticity of the adaptation -- and at the box office.

For the last three months, Newell, Steindorff, and a polyglot cast and crew have taken over the steamy Caribbean port of Cartagena, a little-known colonial gem of leafy, hidden patios and turreted city walls where a great part of the novel is set. They transformed cobbled squares into painstaking re - creations of the 1880s and the 1930s. They turned a commercial tugboat into a replica of a 19th - century paddle steamer. They designed makeup to span five decades and withstand 90-degree heat and humidity.

There were times -- when the city flooded from torrential rainstorms or less-hardy crew members dropped out -- when it looked as if it wasn't going to come together.

Now, with a year of post-production ahead before the film's planned Christmas 2007 release, there's plenty of time to reflect on the expectations that will precede a Hollywood interpretation of the 1985 novel by the master of magical realism. Oscar-winning scriptwriter Ronald Harwood ("The Pianist") wrote the adaptation.

Newell, 64, the versatile director of pictures ranging from the surprise crossover hit "Four Weddings and a Funeral" to big-budget adventure "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" to real-life mobster drama "Donnie Brasco " acknowledged that the expectations associated with this screen adaptation "will be very high, perhaps impossibly high . . . and we may not be forgiven for even trying."

Some Latin American literature fans will question if the story can be told authentically in English. Some film industry insiders will doubt it can be a hit without Hollywood stars. Art-house film fans may think it's just "Hollywood cinema with a funny accent," in Newell's words. Cynical modern moviegoers may need to be convinced by an old-fashioned epic love story. And there will be the big man himself -- 78-year-old Colombian literary giant García Márquez -- watching from the wings.

Nevertheless, Newell is staking his reputation and Steindorff is staking a personal fortune of $50 million on the production because they believe a universal love story will draw in all ages and cultures.

Newell acknowledged that a story of lovers who wait out half a century of marriage, war, and generations is "not an efficient Hollywood story. It's a great big ocean liner of a story that tells truths about people from youth to old age . . . I can see my parents in it, myself when I was young, myself now, and my friends."

The first skeptic to be persuaded, of course, was the author.

Steindorff, 47, a professional skier-turned-real-estate developer who founded Stone Village Productions in 2000, recounts the saga of becoming the first moviemaker to persuade a recalcitrant García Márquez to sell the rights for his 1985 novel. A number of García Márquez stories have been adapted by Latin American or Italian directors, but the only previous Hollywood pitch -- for Sean Penn to direct Marlon Brando in "Autumn of the Patriarch" -- never got made.

Steindorff fell in love with this novel four years ago and immediately called the author's agent, who said the writer had no desire to see an English-language movie made. It took one and a half years of phone calls and faxes before he got a hearing. "I told him I was [main character] Florentino and I wasn't going to give up till I got the prize, and he loved that," Steindorff recalled.


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