An underground pipeline between 375 Hudson and Hollywood? Maybe they should build one. CAA's Sally Willcox has just sold two upcoming Viking novels to the movies, within a day of each other: Terry McMillan's The Interruption of Everything (June) and The Rug Merchant by Meg Mullins (spring 2006). Sony Pictures bought McMillan's latest novel, about a 44-year-old African-American woman facing empty-nest syndrome and a wobbly marriage. Though the story sounds like classic McMillan, it's a somewhat incongruous buy for Sony, generally known more for big-budget boy movies (S.W.A.T; XXX, this summer's Stealth). While there's no producer on the project yet, McMillan has an old friend at the studio to move things along: Deb Schindler, the producer of Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back (based on the McMillan novels of the same names), is now co-head of Sony's New York office, along with former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell.
The Rug Merchant, Mullins's first novel, follows a middle-aged Persian man who emigrates to America but feels disconnected from everything—his adopted country, his family back in Iran—until he begins an affair with a Barnard student he meets in an airport. Fox Searchlight beat out Focus Features and one other bidder for the rights. Viking's Molly Stern acquired the book from the Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency's Molly Friedrich, who—conspiracy theorists alert—also represents McMillan.
Film scouts' ears perked right up upon hearing that agent SusanGolomb has a first novel by a new client on submission. Golomb, after all, represents Jonathan Franzen, whose The Corrections is a favorite among movie types. (Scott Rudin presciently acquired film rights to the manuscript, pre-Pulitzer and pre-Oprah smackdown.) So a few short hours after Thomas Mullen's The Last Town on Earth was submitted to publishers, the manuscript magically appeared in film office inboxes across town. Mullen's novel is set in 1918 in a small mill town that tries to protect itself from the raging flu epidemic sweeping the U.S. by quarantining itself from the outside world. When a soldier enters the town and is shot dead by two local guards, it sets off a chain of tragic events. One scout compared it thematically to Scott Smith's A Simple Plan (Knopf, 1993), another dark novel about a series of small decisions that quickly lead to chaos. CAA's Rich Green is handling film rights.
Update: Mike Albo, the New York actor and coauthor of The Underminer: Or, the Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life has spent the past month on tour bringing his evil title character to theater audiences all over the country (see Hollywood Reader, Mar. 14). Now, if Warner Bros. has its way, the suburban multiplex crowd may also get a dose of Albo's toxic but hilarious "frenemy." The studio has just optioned the book (co-written by New York Times journalist Virginia Heffernan) for Management 360. The Warner-based producers sparked to it soon after Bloomsbury published it in February, but wanted to develop a strong take before bringing it to the studio. Bloomsbury published The Underminer in February. Rich Green brokered the film deal.
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