Swiss firm to put Napoleon's DNA in $8,000 watches

GENEVA - Napoleon's admirers will be able to carry his DNA on their wrists after a Swiss company announced Tuesday its plans to sell watches containing a fragment of the emperor's hair.

Half-millimeter slices of his locks will be placed inside a limited series of some 500 watches that are to bear the likeness of Napoleon, said Viviane de Witt, CEO of De Witt watchmakers, told AFP.

They will sell for the price of around 8,000 euros ($10,000).

The first surgery-like operation to slice up the hair happened Tuesday in the presence of a bailiff at the De Witt factory in Geneva.

"Napoleon was already quite idolized while he was alive, when he got his hair cut people picked it up and kept it," De Witt said.

In this case the hair was part of a 1,000-piece trove of Napoleon memorabilia belonging to the royal family of Monaco, which fetched jaw dropping prices during an auction in mid-November near Paris.

One of the most incredible sale prices was the 1.9 million euros ($2.4 million) a South Korean chicken mogul paid for a hat worn by Napoleon.

De Witt spent a whopping 29,600 euros ($36,900) for items containing Napoleon's hair at the sale, which had been expected to go for up to 7,000 euros ($8,700).

Viviane de Witt's husband, the company founder, is a direct descendant of Jerome Napoleon, the youngest brother of the early 19th-century French emperor.

De Witt makes about 1,500 watches per year with a staff of 60.

source: interaksyon.com

Spielberg to make mini-series about Napoleon

LOS ANGELES – Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg is to make a television mini-series about Napoleon, based on a screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, he told a French broadcaster.

The 66-year-old “Schindler’s List” and “E.T.” filmmaker is working on the basis of a five-decade old script by Kubrick, who directed classics including “A Clockwork Orange” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“I’ve been developing Stanley Kubrick’s screenplay for a mini series, not for a motion picture, about the life of Napoleon,” Spielberg told broadcaster Canal Plus, without saying if he would direct or just produce the project.

“Kubrick wrote the script in 1961, a long time ago,” he said, noting that he and Kubrick were both involved in the development of “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” which came out in 2001.

Kubrick, famed for his obsessive perfectionism, abandoned the Napoleon biopic project in the 1970s because of budget and production challenges, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

In a draft 1971 letter to studio executives, Kubrick — who died in 1999 aged 70 — said of the project: “It’s impossible to tell you what I’m going to do except to say that I expect to make the best movie ever made,” the industry journal said.

Kubrick wrote to actor Oskar Werner offering him the title role, and received a polite refusal to his offer to Audrey Hepburn, it said.

He initially asked British “Clockwork Orange” author Anthony Burgess to write a book about Napoleon, which he would use as the basis for his film. But he was reportedly disappointed by the manuscript.

Spielberg was named last week as jury chairman for this year’s Cannes Film Festival. His appointment came days after his presidential drama “Lincoln” won a disappointing two Oscars, after being nominated in 12 categories.

source: interaksyon.com