Paramount has tapped Scott Kosar to adapt baseball memoir "Wrecking Crew: The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates" and has set up the project with Anonymous Content.
Anonymous' Steve Golin, Shawn Hopkins and Alix Madigan will produce. Par co-prexy of production Brad Weston will oversee the project.
"Wrecking Crew" is based on the story of John Albert, former drummer for punk band Bad Religion and ex-junkie, who chronicled his experience playing with the Griffith Park Pirates. His memoir documents the transformation of the team -- which includes rogues, rockers and struggling Hollywood hopefuls -- as they find that baseball's the thread that connects them.
Kosar, whose credits include "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "The Amityville Horror" and "The Machinist," said he was drawn to the project by his personal relationship with Albert, dating back to the punk movement of the 1980s. "I had a personal connection to the characters and the landscape of the book," he added.
Albert first wrote about the Griffith Park Pirates in an article for the L.A. Weekly that won the West Sports Reporting Award from the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation in 2000.
The project's been in development at Paramount since 2002, when the studio bought a pitch by Emmy-winning scribe Rick Cleveland that was based on Albert's L.A. Weekly article.
Contact Dave McNary at
dave.mcnary@variety.com