SLASH FILM: Director Emma Holly Jones Wants To Bring Back 'Feel-Good' Cinema

Mr. Malcolm's List" has been a longtime coming for Emma Holly Jones. The director is a lifelong fan of period romance — she's named after the "handsome, clever" protagonist of a certain Jane Austen novel — but it took a while to find the perfect project for her feature film debut, something timeless that could still resonate with a modern audience. She first discovered "Mr. Malcolm's List" in 2015, when the screenplay featured on an episode of The Black List Table Reads podcast. From there, Jones worked to score the rights to both the screenplay and the novel the story was based on, both written by Suzanne Allain. It took three years to secure funding for a proof of concept, and though the short film went viral upon release in 2018, another three years would pass before the feature found a home at Bleecker Street