Scribe's on WB 'Diet'

Birnbaum to adapt tome for duo

By MICHAEL FLEMING

Warner Bros. and producers Jennifer and Suzanne Todd have hired Mickey Birnbaum to adapt "The High Impact Infidelity Diet."

Eric Pfeffinger and Lou Harry novel concerns an overweight trio who find weight-loss motivation when their wives dangle a night with a hooker as their reward.

Birnbaum was the original writer of "Used Guys," the comedy Fox famously unplugged over budgetary concerns last summer. While director Jay Roach, Ben Stiller and Jim Carrey didn't get paid, Birnbaum recently cashed a seven-figure check when Fox exercised its option to purchase the property so it wouldn't get away.

Birnbaum wrote that script in 1998 and watched it move from Columbia to DreamWorks and then Fox before the project was halted weeks before production was to begin.

He said that "Infidelity Diet" offered a comparable comic canvas.

"This looks at the dieting industry through the eyes of men when you usually see it through the eyes of women," he said.

Birnbaum's play "Big Death & Little Death," which was a finalist for the Pen USA Literary Award when it opened in D.C. last year, will bow in San Francisco in February and then at the Road Theater in North Hollywood, Calif., in May. His new play, "Bleed Rail," premieres in May at the Boston Court Theater in Pasadena, Calif.