Finder's Keepers
Maybe business schools should start teaching Joseph Finder instead of Jack Welch. The seasoned author set his last two thrillers in a corporate world stocked with more ne'er-do-wells than an Enron staff party. (One book, 2004's Paranoia [St. Martin's] landed a CEO-sized film deal at Warner Bros. with Lorenzo di Bonaventura producing.) CAA's Richard Green is out now with Finder's latest tale of corporate intrigue, Killer Instinct (St. Martin's, May 2006). If you set Strangers on a Train in a skyscraper, the result might be Instinct: in a random encounter, a mid-level but rising executive meets up with a soldier just back from Iraq. The two men bond, and the ambitious suit gets the veteran a job in his company's security department. To show his gratitude, the soldier starts "eliminating" the executive's competition, one by one. At this point, Finder knows his way around the studio lot as well as he does the boardroom. Besides Paranoia, the author sold 1996's The Zero Hour (Morrow) to Fox for a cool million, while his High Crimes (Morrow, 1998) was made into the schlocky 2002 movie starring Ashley Judd at her damsel-in-distress peak. The Aaron M. Priest Agency's Molly Friedrich represents Finder for lit. —J.A.
Spring Is in the Air
Three weeks ago, CFP Productions'Bradford Smith picked up a copy of Sharon Krum's The Thing About Jane Spring (Viking, 2005) in an L.A. bookstore, fell in love with the novel and vowed to marry the author. Though no marriage proposals were offered, Smith did the next best thing: he took the title to Paramount, which immediately optioned the novel in a six-figure deal. In the story, an attractive but overassertive prosecutor learns to soften her ways (and land a man) by mimicking demure 1950s film icon Doris Day. Krum's brainy heroine seems ripe for any number of romantic comedy specialists. (Reese Witherspoon, currently starring in an adaptation of Marc Levy's Just Like Heaven, comes to mind.) Krum is repped by Barbara Zitwer. —M.K.
Heaven Can Wait
If Lynn Pleshette needs a reminder that Hollywood can handle prestigious literary properties, she'll soon get it—this December, adaptations of Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha and Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain (both Pleshette clients) finally hit the screen. Pleshette may soon place another literary work or two in the studio pipeline: Golfing with God (Algonquin, Oct.), in which the writer imagines heaven is made up of 8,187 golf courses, and A Little Love Story (Areheart, Sept.), both by new client Roland Merullo. Pleshette sent Love over to Red Wagon principal (and Geisha producer) LucyFisher, who is in the process of packaging it now. The novel tells the story of a man who meets a woman on the one-year anniversary of the death of his girlfriend, a flight attendant who perished on 9/11. If that doesn't exactly sound like popcorn fare, Pleshette of all people knows that good things come to those who wait: back in the mid-'90s, Pleshette sold both Geisha and Brokeback to Hollywood, but a book set in pre—WWII Japan with no Western characters and a love story between two gay cowboys don't exactly scream "fast track." After years on the development treadmill, the two are now among the year's most anticipated releases. Marly Rusoff represents Merullo for lit. —J.A.
Correction: We misidentified The Dante Club screenwriting team mentioned in the Oct. 17 issue ("Quoth the Raven"); they are Bill Collage and Adam Cooper.
