Dunedin Writer’s Works To Be Filmed In America

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31542, 2 December 1967, Page 1

Dunedin Writer’s Works To Be Filmed In America

(New Zealand Preet deeooiatton)

DUNEDIN, December 1. Four books by a Dunedin author and her father are to be made into a s4m film by the Universal Pictures Corporation of America.

It will be the company’s most elaborate production since “Spartacus”.

The author is Mrs Carl Hebenstreit, better known as Johnnie Frisbie, writer, artist and dancer, who lives with her American husband and four children on the Otago Peninsula.

The books to be filmed were written by Mrs Hebenstreit and her father, the late Robert Dean Frisbie, an American author and Pacific trad-ing-schooner skipper.

All four stories concent the adventures of the Frisbie family in the Pacific Islands between the two world wars. After being invalided out of the United States Army diming World War I, Robert Dean Frisbie went to the Cook Islands for his health, and married an island girl., The family lived in various parts of the Pacific until Mr. Frisbie’s death shortly after the end of the last war.

Mr and Mrs Hebenstreit recently returned to Dunedin after a trip to Hawaii to discuss the film with Universal’s senior producer, Mr F. Rosenberg, and a scriptwriter. “The film will probably begin production in the Pacific next spring,” Mrs Hebenstreit said today.

Mr Rosenberg told the Hebenstreits that he was considering one of three stars to play the male lead in the film—Richard Burton, Burt Lancaster and Henry Fonda. “Of the three, Henry Fonda looks most like my father,”

Mrs Hebenstreit said, “but I suppose it will depend on who is willing and available.” The film will almost certainly be called “Ropati,” after the Polynesian pronunciation of the Christian name “Robert” and title of one of the books. The Hebenstreits were in the news earlier this year when the American actor Adam West "Batman” of the famous television series and Mrs Hebenstreit’s brother-in-law spent a holiday with them at their Dunedin home.