The Daily Mail has posted photos of the James Marsh’s follow-up to the Theory of Everything tentatively named Untitled Donald Crowhurst Project. Firth plays Crowhurst’s story is bizarre on every level but it could be a bravura performance by Firth. Here is what Wikipedia says about him:
Donald Charles Alfred Crowhurst (1932–1969) was a British businessman and amateur sailor who died while competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race. Crowhurst had entered the race in hopes of winning a cash prize from The Sunday Times to aid his failing business. Instead, he encountered difficulty early in the voyage, and secretly abandoned the race while reporting false positions, in an attempt to appear to complete a circumnavigation without actually circling the world. Evidence found after his disappearance indicates that this attempt ended in insanity and suicide.
His background was also a tad strange:
Crowhurst was born in 1932 in Ghaziabad[citation needed], British India. His mother was a school teacher and his father worked on the Indian railways. Crowhurst was raised as a girl until the age of 7, given his mother’s desire for a daughter rather than a son. After India gained its independence, his family moved back to England. The family’s retirement savings were invested in an Indian sporting goods factory, which later burned down during rioting after the Partition of India.
Crowhurst’s father died in 1948. Due to family financial problems, he was forced to leave school early and started a five-year apprenticeship at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough Airfield. In 1953 he received a Royal Air Force commission as a pilot, but was asked to leave the Royal Air Force in 1954 for reasons that remain unclear, and was subsequently commissioned in to the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in 1956. After leaving the Army in the same year owing to a disciplinary incident, Crowhurst eventually moved to Bridgwater, where he started a business called Electron Utilisation. He was active in his local community as a member of the Liberal Party and was elected to Bridgwater Borough Council.
And finally:
Crowhurst’s behaviour as recorded in his logs indicates a complex and conflicted psychological state. His commitment to fabricating the voyage reports seems incomplete and self-defeating, as he reported unrealistically fast progress that was sure to arouse suspicion. By contrast, he spent many hours meticulously constructing false log entries, often more difficult to complete than real entries due to the celestial navigation research required.
The last several weeks of his log entries, once he was facing the real possibility of winning the prize, showed increasing irrationality. In the end, his writings during the voyage – poems, quotations, real and false log entries, and random thoughts – amounted to more than 25,000 words. The log books include an attempt to construct a philosophical reinterpretation of the human condition that would provide an escape from his impossible situation. It appeared the final straw was the impossibility of a noble way out after Tetley sank, meaning he would win the prize and hence his logs would be subject to scrutiny.
His last log entry was on 1 July 1969; it is assumed that he then jumped overboard and drowned. The state of the boat gave no indication that it had been overrun by a rogue wave or that any accident had occurred which might have caused Crowhurst to fall overboard. He may have taken with him a single deceptive log book and the ship’s clock. Three log books (two navigational logs and a radio log) and a large mass of other papers were left on his boat; these communicated his philosophical ideas and revealed his actual navigational course during the voyage. Although his biographers, Tomalin and Hall, discounted the possibility that some sort of food poisoning contributed to his mental deterioration, they acknowledged that there is insufficient evidence to rule it (or several other hypotheses) out.
No word yet on whether this will be a 2015 or a 2016 release. According to Deadline, “The film is produced by Pete Czernin, Graham Broadbent and Scott Z. Burns, alongside Nicolas Mauvernay and Jacques Perrin of Galatee. It was developed with Christine Langan from BBC Films and Studiocanal, and Burns wrote the script.”
