Blu Riviera | Emilio Audissino

A former super model, now a single mother who is broke, moves from the big city to a provincial town to take a job in a danceclub in the Italian Riviera, making both friends and enemies in the nightlife community while attempting to deal with a variety of prejudices.

ONE-HOUR TV SERIES PROJECT

Created by Emilio Audissino & Marco Vallarino and Pierluigi Voi

Developed for TV by Emilio Audissino & Marco Vallarino & Pierluigi Voi

What happens when celebrities sink into obscurity? Aleksandra “Lexie” Mironova, the daughter of a Milan fashion designer and a Russian opera tenor, wins a national beauty pageant at 16 and subsequently begins modelling, spurred on by her mother’s burning ambition. Lexie soon becomes one of the trendiest super-models of the 2000s. The success and jet-set perks are accompanied by her feeling of living a life determined by somebody else. At least until life presents Lexie with a dilemma: an unplanned pregnancy in her mid-twenties. Against both her mother and her agent’s firm opposition, Lexie decides to keep the baby.

This choice leads to a period of “retirement”, supposedly a temporary one. But show business has a short memory and an insatiable hunger for novelties, and when Lexie is ready for a comeback, she’s become expired merchandise. Now in her early thirties, the single mother of a five-year-old girl (Alba), she struggles to make ends meet, juggling diminutive guest appearances, second-rate commercials, and tele-marketing hosting gigs on local networks. At Alba’s birth, Lexie burned all bridges with her mother, and her father Grigorij had been a distant figure for years, since he moved back to Saint Petersburg after a sour divorce. Lexie’s only trusted friend is the fashion designer Jurij, her neighbour and Alba’s godfather; he’s always ready to help, including financially.

On the verge of being evicted from her no longer affordable Milan flat, Lexie is forced to take the only job that her agent has come up with: a summer gig as a go-go dancer at the Blu Riviera, a beach danceclub on the Italian Riviera. For a thirty-something former celebrity, the job is truly humiliating, even more so because Lexie has to face the constant hostility of the other, much younger, dancers, employed and therefore controlled by a determined opponent: Vicky. She is the powerful manager of the GlamGlare Agency; she’s been in charge for the Blu Riviera talent for years and cannot bear it that someone was hired outside of her agency and, ergo, her control. Indeed, Vicky’s other agenda is her exploitation of the Blu Riviera as a front for a France-based high-end prostitution ring. The new outsider Lexie could become a threat to this very lucrative alternative line of business. Vicky has long exerted significant influence on one of the co-owners of the Blu Riviera, Danny, using confidential information concerning his scandalous past as leverage; she pushes him and pulls all the other strings at her disposal to have him fire Lexie.

Her traumatic change is mitigated by the hospitality and affection of Lexie’s uncle, Don Bruno, the open-minded parish priest of the local village. He offers accommodation to Lexie and Alba in the parsonage, undaunted by the perplexity of his traditionalist elderly housekeeper and the increasingly venomous gossip of the village’s bigots.

At the Blu Riviera, Lexie makes acquaintance with the colourful and varied characters who animate the club: an entertainment journalist, a huge fan of hers; the jovial bartender Johnny Fatso; the egocentric DJ Tommy King, soon to be her stalker; the pack of regular nighthawks, including two daddy’s boys from Milan and three adventure-seeking college girls from Turin. The place is not only energised by the dancing, the music, and the flirting, but also by the hidden drug dealing which, unbeknownst to the owners, risks putting the club’s reputation at serious risk.

Just like Grey’s Anatomy which offered a peek behind the scenes of a hospital and its routines, presenting the private lives of those who worked there, Blu Riviera presents the locales, routines, private lives, and daily vicissitudes of nighttime entertainment employees. The danceclub itself, the Blu Riviera, is a central character, the axis around which all events and personal lives gravitate: a place of perdition for some, a place of redemption for others.

Sample Sequence from the Pilot Script

Episode Script by Emilio Audissino

Story by Emilio Audissino & Marco Vallarino & Pierluigi Voi

Deposited: WGAw 1804824

IMDb

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