Phoenix Pictures has set up a feature project on award-winning ABC journalist John Hockenberry's memoir, "Moving Violations," with Jonathan Kaplan ("The Accused") attached to helm, the company said Monday.
Pic will be about the former correspondent for National Public Radio and now ABC's "Day One," who became a paraplegic at 19 after a car accident. Story will chart the obstacles he battled in his job, which included riding uphill on a mule in Iraq surrounded by Kurdish refugees, navigating his wheelchair through desert, auditioning to be the first journalist in space and covering the Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral.
Nick Wechsler of Addis/Wechsler Prods. and Deena Goldstone are producing. Julia Chasman is exec producer. Newly named Phoenix senior exec VP Rick Hess will oversee the project.
Goldstone, who wrote "Safe Passage," will script the pic.
"John Hockenberry is an inspiration," Phoenix chairman and CEO Mike Medavoy says. "Not allowing himself to be controlled by his confinement in a wheelchair, John has filled his life with daredevil adventures."
Director Kaplan's most recent credits include "Love Field," "Unlawful Entry" and the ABC miniseries "In Cold Blood."
CAA's Sally Willcox repped Hockenberry in the deal. Lynn Pleshette, of her eponymously named lit agency, brokered Goldstone's deal.
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