This week in Page to Screen—PW's weekly column tracking film rights circulating and sold in Hollywood—Howie Sanders at UTA tries to option a Facebook update (along with a canine's life rights) and Inkwell sells Lavender Queen for film.
If Twitter tweets are being bought by New York editors, and HarperCollins is turning Chesley Sullenberger into a published poet, who's to say you can't build a book, and a film, from a Facebook update? Howie Sanders, at UTA, and Christy Fletcher are currently trying to do just that for Lisa Hamilton Daly. Daly, a former exec at Dreamworks and friend of Fletcher's, wryly posted last week: "Lisa Hamilton Daly's Pomeranian raided Chinese takeout bag overnight, opened and ate a fortune cookie. Her fortune: You have strong spiritual powers, and you should develop them." Fletcher, who runs the New York lit agency Fletcher and Company, was thoroughly amused by the comment and immediately saw a story in it. Now Fletcher's teamed up with Sanders on a tween series about Charlotte, the Pomeranian, who uses her newfound superpowers to save her owner's home after said owner loses her job and is forced to contemplate moving in with her folks, in a deal that would entail selling the Facebook update and optioning the dog's life rights. Joking aside, the duo sees a market for the idea, especially given the recent talking-dog hit, Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
On the sales front, Richard Pine at Inkwell optioned The Unlikely Lavender Queen to producer Pamela Long (who's done various docs for National Geographic). The 2008 memoir by Jeanne Ralston, which Broadway Books published, chronicles the author's experiences as a young magazine editor in New York City, who, after an assignment and a chance meeting with a photojournalist, picks up her life and moves with said shutterbug to Texas. The sojourn to the Lone Star state leads to marriage, family and the creation of a burgeoning business in which the couple sell lavender gowns on their Hill Country farm.
