IP Picks🔎: The Race to Row the Atlantic Solo
âž• A plucky widower takes on some scammers, a woman thinks her best friend's hubby might be a murderer and a college hazing scandal
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
We are living in historic times. It’s amazing to realize that the last time the actors struck against the studios Ronald Reagan was president, the first Star Wars sequel had just been released and people were just discovering the Blues Brothers. Even more amazing, it has been more than 60 years since actors and writers struck at the same time—that’s more than half the history of Hollywood! (Interesting fact: Ronald Reagan was also president then — SAG president mind you, not the American president.)
It is a tough moment for everyone — writers, producers, actors, executives. There are real issues at stake, but I have a lot of empathy for everyone. No one wants to be stuck in limbo, unsure when things are going to be resolved, do they? But not everything is in limbo and that’s why the I think the Optionist is more valuable than ever right now. New books are still being published. News keeps on happening. New IP is like a mighty river. It keeps flowing whether you’re watching it or not. Now’s the time to find your next project so that when the strikes end you’re ready to move. Really, now might be the best time to be looking —while others are distracted you can snap up something cool. Indeed, I’m mapping out a summer of great newsletters in my head.
While Hollywood is writing its own history as we speak, we’ve been working on getting The Optionist Archive up and running. Many of you asked if there could be an easy way to search through past posts and we agreed it was a worthy addition. Over at Archive, you’ll find links to several useful posts, including All Books, which is a chronological list (from oldest to newest) of all the titles we’ve featured and the genre(s) they fit in. There’s also a separate list of all the articles/podcasts we’ve featured under All Journalism. In Archive, you’ll also find links to separate genre posts (Drama, Thriller, Sports, etc.), arranged chronologically, so if you’re interested in all the rom-coms or mysteries we’ve featured, you can see them all in one place. These genre posts feature the full entries from when we originally featured them. Some books/articles are cross-listed in more than one genre post — for example, biopic and history or mystery and thriller.
Note: this is just the beta version of Archive, and over the coming weeks, we will be updating it with selections from the most recent newsletters, expanding the genre categories (Current Events is top of my list for a new tab), and adding notations on those whose rights have been optioned.
Mostly, we want the archive to be helpful to you so let me know what you like, what you don’t and any suggestions for improving it as we refine it.
This week’s picks include four true stories ripe for adaptation and a new Hollywood noir. July’s going to be a great month; I’ve already got a backlog of good material in the queue for the next few issues. Here’s today’s full rundown:
An adventure/mystery about a 70-something retiree who, after getting bilked of her fortune in an internet scam, heads to Romania to confront the thieves and get her money back.
A thriller about a woman who spots her best friend’s husband in a photo with another woman and goes from wondering if he’s a cheat to suspecting he might be a murderer.
A true adventure story about the 1969 race between two men, one a reckless playboy and the other a methodical former commando, to become the first person to solo row across the Atlantic.
A journalism procedural about how a group of college journalists exposed a pattern of hazing on the football team and forced the firing of the legendary head coach after the school tried to cover it up.
An inspirational feel-good journalism procedural about a team of high-school students who exposed transgender bullying by staff at the middle school in their supposedly liberal college town.
