Studios turn to books, magazines
April 17, 2008
Feature development execs were bracing for a deluge of feature spec scripts to flood the market after the 100-day writers strike wrapped in mid-February. But the storm, if it’s brewing at all, has yet to hit, so the majors are chasing after books and magazine articles harder than they have in years.
Warner Bros. acquired “The Lost Girls,” an 87-page proposal by Amanda Pressner, Jennifer Baggett and Holly Corbett, who gave up their media jobs and boyfriends to travel the world for a year, blogging every step of the way. The book will be published by HarperCollins.
DreamWorks has acquired “Deep Sea Cowboy,” an article that Joshua Davis wrote in the March issue of Wired, for a feature to be produced by “Transformers” and “Star Trek” scribes Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci; Pete Chiarelli exec produces. Article revolved around Rich Habib, who runs Titan Salvage, which races all over the world to salvage sinking giant ships and their cargo.
WB also bought “The Rapture,” an upcoming novel by British author Liz Jensen that will be published in the U.S. by Random House. Novel is about a peculiar young girl with the ability to predict natural disasters who teams with her psychologist and a physicist to stop an offshore drilling project off the coast of Florida that the girl is convinced will cause an apocalyptic earthquake.
Miramax has optioned Wall Street Journal article “The Heart Has Its Reasons,” by Kevin Helliker, for Mandalay to produce. It’s the story of an unlikely romance between 27-year old convicted murderer John Manard and Toby Young, a 48-year-old social worker who was a married mother of two when she smuggled Manard out of prison. They ran away together with $42,000 of her retirement money before they were caught in a cabin in Tennessee.
Scott Rudin dipped into his own funds to make a preemptive acquisition of “Indignation,” the Philip Roth novel to be published in September by Houghton Mifflin.
Via Variety
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