Fox Searchlight Acquires CHOKE

Said Fox Searchlight Pictures President Peter Rice, “Writer-director Clark Gregg’s wickedly funny and wildly original feature film debut brings a fresh filmmaking voice to the big screen with an incredibly engaging and provocative story.”

Added Clark Gregg, “I’ve watched the bold creative way Searchlight has handled films which take the kind of risks that we've tried to take with CHOKE, so when their entire creative team sat with me right after the screening and spoke so incisively about the film, it was a very easy decision."

Actor-turned-director Clark Gregg shows he is as adept behind the camera as he is in front of it with CHOKE, a wickedly colorful dark comedy about mothers and sons, sexual compulsion, and the sordid underbelly of Colonial theme parks.

Victor Mancini (Rockwell), a sex-addicted med-school dropout, who keeps his increasingly deranged mother, Ida (Huston), in an expensive private medical hospital by working days as a historical reenactor at a Colonial Williamsburg theme park. At night Victor runs a scam by deliberately choking in upscale restaurants to form parasitic relationships with the wealthy patrons who “save” him. When, in a rare lucid movement, Ida reveals that she has withheld the shocking truth of his father’s identity, Victor enlists the aid of his best friend, Denny (Henke) and his mother’s beautiful attending physician, Dr. Paige Marshall (Macdonald), to solve the mystery before the truth of his possibly divine parentage is lost forever.