Hollywood Reader

Producers looking to add a jolt of adrenaline to their slate just might find what they're looking for at Richard Pine's Inkwell offices. Pine has just notched yet another film deal for one of his stable of suspense writers. Peter Blauner, the ex-journalist turned thriller writer, has optioned his latest novel, Slipping into Darkness (Little, Brown, 2006), to Warner Bros., with Basil Iwanyk (We Are Marshall) producing. Blauner last heard from Hollywood when Mandalay Entertainment rushed in with a seven-figure preempt for 1996's The Intruder (S&S), but in the years between, Pine has kept busy supplying some of the biggest names in the genre to the industry. Besides Blauner, Pine sold Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider (the only two James Patterson novels to make it to the big screen), James Siegel's triple Ds—Derailed, Detour and Deceit, all optioned by Lorenzo di Bonaventura—and Christopher Reich's follow-the-money mysteries The Devil's Banker and The Patriots Club, which Cruise-Wagner scooped up in a twofer (see Hollywood Reader, Feb. 21, 2005). CAA's Richard Green coagented the Blauner deal.

Those reading last week's Variety coverage of the dueling Alexander Litvinenko film projects may have noticed some striking similarities between the Litvinenko case and another sensational true crime story—the so-called NYPD "mafia cop" scandal. Both cases sparked intense studio interest, resulting in high-profile deals at Columbia and Warner Bros. (Universal and Mandalay jumped into the game later with their option of accused dirty cop Louis Eppolito's 1992 memoir, Mafia Cop: The Story of an Honest Cop Whose Family Was the Mob [S&S], which of course turned out to be as veracious as James Frey on What's My Line?) With Columbia's pricey option of Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko's Death of a Dissident (Free Press, May), the studio is set to lock horns once again with Warners, which days earlier acquired Sasha's Story: The Life and Death of a Russian Spy by New York Times London bureau chief Alan Cowell. Observers will note other parallels between the two cases: like the mafia cop projects, Hollywood jumped in long before the case was resolved. (In fact, Eppolito and co-defendant Stephen Caracappa's original conviction was overturned on the most technical of technicalities.) Not a problem, said a source: "Even if the story ends here, it's still a fascinating case."

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