Project Buttercup

I’d been looking for a book to read to my niece but with a twist. I’m a couple thousand miles away from her, and am always looking for creative ways to be a part of her life. Originally I’d intended to to create a recording of myself reading a book so that she might get interested in reading - but when I got down to practicalities, there isn’t really a reason to do this when she can listen to an already-produced audio book. Plus, there were issues around media storage, how long it might take me to do, and so on.

Dad and I started talking about The Princess Bride. He’d received a copy of the book from my brother and his wife - probably intended to be read to my niece - so I grabbed a copy of the book to see if it might work. Turned out, the book didn’t feel like the beloved movie at all. and I went searching for another way forward. The story felt right, but the story most of us remember is from the movie. So how to go about doing this?

Early in the pandemic there was a video service called Quibi (it didn’t last a year). One of their projects was a re-telling of The Princess Bride by a ton of celebrities who were otherwise stuck in their homes. They turned their video cameras on themselves and recorded scenes from the movie. Later the director edited together the scenes into 10 minute shorts which released daily until the story was done. It was a bright spot in an otherwise dreary lockdown, and I watched each day for a break from everything.

During one phone call with Dad, I thought ‘why can’t we do the same thing?’ What if we created a re-telling of the story with people she knows - it might be something we could all do for her together, it would scratch my itch to do a fun project with lots of people, and as it turned out the script was available free online. That’s how this project started.