Tyro scribe parks 'Emperor' with WB, Wells
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Screenwriter Stephen Schiff has signed on to adapt the book for Warner Bros., John Wells and Gaylord Films.
A legal thriller about a black law professor exploring the darker corners of the life of his deceased father, a prominent judge, it grabbed headlines last year after fetching more than $4 million in a two-book deal from Knopf -- perhaps the highest advance for a first-time novelist.
The book has just appeared to mixed reviews, but that shouldn't damage its prospects as a studio property. Wrote the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani: "It reads as if it were written for serial publication, with nearly every chapter ending on a hokey cliffhanger and portentous foreshadowings of what fresh hell is yet to come." The same could be said for most summer tentpoles.
Schiff, who's written for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, has adapted books running the gamut from Vladmir Nabokov's "Lolita" to Jacquelyn Mitchard's "The Deep End of the Ocean." He also wrote a draft of the recent Richard Gere/Diane Lane thriller, "Unfaithful."
LEW WASSERMAN'S STATURE as an industry power broker owes something to his scrupulous ability to keep his relations with Hollywood magnates and political leaders in strictest confidence.
The man who began his career as a press agent always kept the press at arm's length, granting few interviews and declining every invitation to pen his memoirs.
But there are at least two biographies of Wasserman on the way.
New Yorker writer Connie Bruck is close to delivering a book on Wasserman and MCA to Random House. Years in the writing, the book is said to be comparable to Bruck's account of Steve Ross and the formation of Time Warner, "Master of the Game." Random House expects to publish it next year.
Also in the pipeline is "Power Couple: How Lew and Edie Wasserman Invented Hollywood" by Boston Globe writer Kathleen Sharp. Book, which examines the relationship between the man who built MCA into a global powerhouse, and his wife, who forged close ties with its star clients, will be published by Carroll & Graf in fall 2003.
They'll join Dennis McDougal's 1998 bio, "The Last Mogul," whose Amazon sales rank among BevHills customers climbed to No. 14 Tuesday. McDougal's muckraking account of Wasserman's hardball tactics and alleged links to organized crime has been disputed by some readers. The real story, like many of MCA's best-kept secrets, likely followed Wasserman to his grave.
