I love when a newspaper article is optioned as the basis for a movie, because it gives such hope to the little guys. Classifieds, accident reports and those creepy carpet cleaning ads in your neighborhood paper all have a shot. While to some the future of film is obviously CraigsList: The Movie, what I really want to see is a film based on a typo. Then the working class will truly own the media.
Maybe J.J. Abrams could make it happen. He’s starting big via Paramount, which has locked up the rights to a New York Times article called ‘Mystery on Fifth Avenue’ for Abrams to produce. The piece is about an (admittedly awesome) apartment on the Upper East Side redesigned by Eric Clough for the occupants with “hidden compartments, messages, puzzles, poems, codes and games for their four preteen kids.” This article just ran last Thursday. Fast-track!
Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky will call upon Ivo Shandor to transmit the apartment’s floorplan into a screenplay. (They also wrote The Rocker, which suggests an existing working relationship with old Ivo.) A director is to be named later.
Now where’s my Winchester Mystery House movie? (Rose Red doesn’t count.)