Play It Again, Bob!
From the Department of No Brainers: You're an author with a 10-year Hollywood hot streak and your new manuscript features a retired but sensitive 60-something Mafia hit man who breaks down every time he hears La Bohème. Who you gonna call? Robert De Niro, naturally. CAA's Sally Willcox submitted Don Winslow's latest thriller, The Winter of Frankie Machine (Knopf, 2006) to the legendary goodfella's Tribeca Productions as an exclusive. Clearly De Niro liked what he read—he's now attached to produce and star, and has it for three studios: Paramount, Warner's and home-studio Universal. Should Frankie go to Hollywood, it would cap a busy season for Winslow. Actor Paul Walker and director John Herzfeld recently signed on for Millennium Films' adaptation of his The Death and Life of Bobby Z (Knopf, 1997). Jimmy Vines of the Vines Agency reps Winslow for lit. —J.A.
Boys Wanna Have Fun, Too
Why should girls have all the fun? Now that Fox 2000's adaptation of Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada starring Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep is halfway through production, development honchos are keeping their eyes out for the next big opportunity in assistant lit, gender be damned. Just sold to Little, Brown, David Bledin's Bank may just fit the bill. Based on the 24-year-old former investment banker's real-life experiences in Toronto, the debut novel follows a 20-something associate who quickly learns that sometimes a six-figure salary isn't worth the lack of sleep and overload of stress. Pitched in the vein of Adam Davies's The Frog King and Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker, the comedy is generating interest among several producers. Bledin is repped by Matt McGowan at Frances Goldin Literary Agency for lit and the Gersh Agency's Amy Schiffman for film. —M.K.
Hollywood on the Potomac
Clearly the town has a taste for the rough-and-tumble world of politics. There's The West Wing and this season's surprise hit Commander-in-Chief, of course, while on the feature side, there's Sammy's Hill (Hyperion, 2004), Kristin Gore's inside-the-beltway novel. Now comes Dog Days(Riverhead, Jan.) by D.C. journalist— turned—Wonkette blogger Ana Marie Cox, on submission from CAA's Shari Smiley. The novel follows 28-year-old campaign staffer Melanie Thorton as she juggles a blossoming romance with a political scandal that threatens to derail her candidate's presidential bid. Cox is in good hands: Smiley recently sold The Washingtonienne, the debut novel by fellow D.C. blogger Jessica Cutler, to HBO, with Sarah Jessica Parker producing. Gary Morris of the David Black Literary Agency reps Cox for lit. —J.A.
Briefs...
With at least four Katrina books already under contract, producers interested in bringing one of the U.S.'s most devastating natural disasters to the big screen have no shortage of literary source material. Question is, does Hollywood care? While one studio exec claims, "If a writer came to us with an interesting take, we'd be interested," others say Katrina is better suited for television. "It's not 9/11," says another. "It won't have the same impact on the public consciousness." Immediately after 9/11, many industry insiders speculated that it would take years before audiences could handle such raw subject matter. Universal, Paramount and Sony all have 9/11 projects in the works. —J.A.
