From a struggling Cuban doctor to a $20 million porn drama

by Jorn Rossing Jensen

11/05/2012 - Credited with such local box office successes as Blood Brothers (2005) and Say That You Love Me (2006), which won a Guldbagge, the Swedish national film prize, Swedish director Daniel Fridell (picture) has been signed to helm the $20 million A Private Story, about Swedish porn king Berth Milton Jr.

Instigated by US talent agency William Morris Endeavor, represented by global head of packaging Graham Taylor, A Private Story will be produced by Mirijam Johansson, of Wanted Pictures and Ken Meyer/Jim Steele of Revelin Studios.

At the upcoming Cannes International Film Festiva, Fridell – who described the film as The Godfather meets Boogie Nights – will announce further details of the production which will commence principal photography this summer for a 2013 delivery.

Previously, an Airborne TV-FIVE film, The Reluctant Porn King (2001), depicted the life of how Milton JR, who went from a small Swedish town boy to running his father’s porn business, the Private Media Group, which Nasdaq has valued at $200 million.

When in the early 1990s he took over the company from his father, then an alcoholic with financial problems, he turned it into a blue-movie powerhouse producing such films as Gladiator, the dirty version of the Russell Crowe-starrer.

Milton Jr. was recently (March) ousted by the investors, and responded that he would take his revenge on screen: “A lot of people should be very scared about this movie - famous people, wealthy people, politicians. Even I myself won’t look that good, but I don’t care, it will be the truth."

Fridell’s most recent film, El Médico: The Cubaton Story, a documentary about a Cuban doctor dreaming of being an artist and healing his people through his music, has screened at the Mar De Plata, Busan and Austin film festivals.