IP Picks🔎: Jump on the 'Fleishman' Follow-up
âž• A psychedelic Indiana Jones and 'Dune' on the moon
Welcome to The Optionist. Thanks for reading along.
Let’s kick it off this week with something I don’t normally do. I’d like to flag Taffy Brodesser-Akner's forthcoming novel, Long Island Compromise, which comes out in July. I don't generally recommend books that I haven't read — I'm expecting a copy any day now — but I want to draw your attention to it up front because her first novel, 2019’s Fleishman Is in Trouble, was both great in print and on the small screen for FX, and her reps at CAA are already fielding offers.
Long Island Compromise sounds great and it seems to be right in her wheelhouse. It follows the saga of the Fletcher family over 40 years, starting in 1980 when family patriarch Carl, a wealthy businessman, was kidnapped and held for ransom for a week. In the present, the family is still dealing with the consequences of that traumatic event. Carl is still looking for closure, his wife Ruth wants security, his lawyer son Nathan is consumed by fear, his second son Beamer (a screenwriter) just wants to consume anything and everything and his daughter Jenny is desperate to escape the family legacy. When they all realize that the family fortune has almost run out, each has to reckon with how wealth has defined their entire lives — their successes and their failures. I was a fan of Fleishman (but, look, as an East Coast Jew of that generation, I was an easy sell). I'm pretty confident that this one will find a buyer soon.
There's just one potential complication . . . or benefit, depending on your point of view: Brodesser-Akner, who is carving out a career in Hollywood as well, is likely to want to adapt the book herself, as she did with Fleishman. Generally, I think authors adapting their own works isn't a great idea. Writing a screenplay flexes a completely different set of muscles than book writing does. Marathoners don't make good sprinters. Plus, authors are often too close to their own work to make good calls about what should stay and what should be streamlined. It can get sticky if the writer pens a screenplay that never gets produced and the rights to the book revert back to them.
Brodesser-Akner is a reminder why I don't hold to that view dogmatically. She was Fleishman’s showrunner — her rookie effort — and managed an adaptation to the screen that both honored the novel and worked on its own as a TV show. We all know how hard it is to stick that particular landing. (Luring Jesse Eisenberg, Claire Danes and Lizzy Caplan certainly didn’t hurt either).
I know that some authors are possessive of every iteration of their work (though others, like Stephen King, don't care). The best conversation with an author that I ever had about this was about 10 years ago. I want to say it was with James McBride when we discussed his crazy, insane book about James Brown's remains, but don’t hold me to that. When asked if it would bother him if an adaptation diverged significantly from his book, he said it wouldn’t. "The thing is" — I'm paraphrasing, but very closely — "I've got the book. That's my version. The movie or TV show, that's its own thing. If I ever get disappointed, I can just go back to the book and think that's mine and it’s never changing." I always thought that was one of the smartest and healthiest attitudes I’ve ever heard.
Side note: It's been a while since I’ve read his James Brown story, but after a week where the Bob Marley biopic One Love is killing it at the box office and ambitious movies about The Beatles (four of them, actually) and the Bee Gees were announced, someone should take a long look at Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. It's not a biopic, but rather a crazy-great tale about the fight over Brown's body after he died in 2006. Maybe a doc? Whatever the case, McBride is such a delightful raconteur, I'd want to option one of his books just to hang out with him.
On to this week’s picks, which include a gripping survival tale and a big-swing space drama.
A campus thriller about a woman investigating the death of her sister — suicide or murder? — and the Ivy League secret society that may be responsible.
A survival tale involving five sailors stranded on a remote island for 18 months.
A quartet of horror novellas from an up-and-coming talent.
A period adventure about a college student — a young Indiana Jones type — hunting for mythical Aztec psychedelics.
A drama about a young woman pursuing the serial killer who murdered her mother.
A future-set epic space drama about warring families on the moon.
