IP Picks🔎: A 'Big Short'-Style Crypto Tale

➕ 'crisis interventionists' helping get kids off the streets and into rehab

TALES FROM THE CRYPTO Child actor-turned-crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce is featured in a new book charting the rise and fall of crypto. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.

Perhaps you read this Washington Post piece about Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s epically failed plan to build an American-style suburban town in the Amazon rainforest for his harvest workers, and thought, “This would make an awesome movie.” Well, we thought so as well, which is why last year we flagged Greg Grandin’s account of that misadventure as a backlist pick when we learned the original option had expired.

I don’t always highlight picks that get sold. It’s not that I’m not interested, but the truth is I’m looking ahead and not behind. I’m more focused on finding you your next great hit than hyping something that’s off the market. But I was reminded twice this morning that material featured here doesn’t stay on the market for long. The rep for a book we featured a couple of weeks ago pinged me a few days ago to say that they had gotten surge of inquiries and are getting ready to close a deal. (I don’t want to jinx it by saying which book until the deal is done.) Last year, we highlighted this awesome procedural that featured two non-traditional female leads and a cool Rocky Mountain setting. When I got the galley for the second book in the series — I liked the first one so much I was planning on reading the second for fun — I learned that the series had been optioned.

All this is a way of saying, if you’re looking for good material, you’re going to find it here on The Optionist. It’s why The Optionist is such a ridiculously good deal. I had a working lunch a few days ago at a nice restaurant. My part of the bill was more than two-thirds the cost of a week of The Optionist. Wouldn’t you trade one lunch for your next project? Seems like a bargain to me.

On to this week’s picks, which include a drama set during the Gold Rush, a crypto comedy and a look inside the world of “crisis interventionists.” The full rundown:

• A drama about a family trying to make its fortune during the Gold Rush and how the events haunt their descendants down to the present.

• A dark comedy or satire following a journalist down the crypto rabbit hole.

• A thriller about how the discovery of the body of a long-missing woman threatens to tear a small town apart.

• A drama about “crisis interventionists” — unregulated street counselors who promise to help get loved ones off the streets and into treatment facilities — for a fee.

• A con drama about a grifter who scammed millions by inventing the most convincing mail-order psychic.