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An American Tragedy
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Given Hollywood's penchant for optioning real-life tragedies, it was only a matter of time before Terri Schiavo's tale was picked up—in the form of Dutton's just-released Terri: The Truth by her husband, Michael Schiavo, with Peabody Award—winning documentarian Michael Hirsh. The buyers? A quartet of producers, including Mike Farrell and his partner Marvin Minoff (Patch Adams), and Lawrence Bender and his partner Kevin Brown (CBS's Dr. Vegas), who are interested in turning the book into a feature film or television movie. Although no screenwriter has yet been hired, the tentative plan is to begin with the couple's romance and lead into Michael's much-publicized struggle with Terri's parents to remove her feeding tube after doctors pronounced her brain-dead.
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Spies 'R' Us
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After the success of Stephan Gaghan's Syriana last year and good buzz this year surrounding Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd and Steven Soderbergh's The Good German, spies are hot. The latest spook project to get a greenlight? Robert Littell's spy thriller The Company: A Novel of the CIA (Overlook, 2002). Originally optioned by Columbia Pictures in a seven-figure deal for feature film development, the Cold War epic is now being declassified at the cable network TNT as a six-part miniseries—though with its overabundance of Russian double agents, heavy-drinking office chiefs and dastardly spies, the tale could easily spin out numerous other episodes. Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, John Calley, David Zucker and Ken Nolan will executive produce.
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Beginner's Luck
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Harper's Joelle Yudin has preempted world rights to 29-year-old Chad Kultgen's first novel, Average American Male, an unapologetic take on hidden male inner life and sexual fantasy that has also sold to Showtime to be adapted into a scripted show produced by George Clooney and Grant Heslov's Section 8 Productions; Trident's Alex Glass made the sale. Kultgen has also just sold an original screenplay to New Line; Harper will publish his book in summer 2007. Kultgen is a graduate of USC's School of Cinema-Television and a former writer for the Weekly World News.
—Reported by Matthew Thornton
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