Mining Some Family History

After selling his Internet company for a princely sum, David Mendez now plans to make an extremely expensive home movie.

By FilmStew Staff, FilmStew.com

In 2000, David Mendez sold his supply chain software company SupplyBase Inc. for $380 million to i2 Technologies. Two years later, his grandmother Nancy Dynes passed away at the age of 95. Now, Mendez is in pre-production on a 2008 feature film about her life, which he is self-financing to the tune of somewhere between $10 and $20 million.

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Titled 700 Hill after the West Virginia mining settlement where Dynes grew up, the drama will tell the story of how she was shunned by her white Appalachian family after marrying a Mexican man and had to subsequently raise five children on her own. "I've always been sort of the family historian," Mendez tells Jackson, Michigan newspaper the Citizen Patriot. "This is my passion and dream. I was meant to tell this story and honor my family in this way."

Mendez says he is in the process of negotiating with representatives of A-list talent to secure a name actress to portray his cinematic grandma. After the death of her husband, Dynes moved to Jackson and worked as a waitress at the Hayes Hotel.

The film will also touch on the life of Mendez's great grandfather and Dynes' father, Sebastian Mendez, who first migrated to the U.S. "There were many Mexican immigrants who came to work in the coal mines of Appalachia [West Virginia]," Mendez explains. "That's sort of an unknown piece of history."