IP Picks 🔎: Three Riveting True Crime Stories
âž• a modern-day vampire tale and a music-world mystery about stolen scores
Welcome to The Optionist! Thanks for reading along. It’s been a busy week here. If you missed it, we broke the news that Apple has moved on from adapting Maggie Haberman’s Trump book, Confidence Man, and then broke the news that Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot) is adapting Jeffrey Toobin’s forthcoming book about Timothy McVeigh, Homegrown, into a limited series. (My colleagues at The Ankler broke yet another piece of IP news this week too, about Michael Lewis spending six months embedded with Sam Bankman-Fried — and the option for filmed rights going out… before a word of the book was even written!)
It’s part of the bonus edition of The Optionist I’ve added to my regular rotation. These (free) editions explore the intersection of intellectual property and Hollywood more generally. We chat with newsmakers, explore trends and highlight important stories you might have missed, plus, I share what else I’m reading.
Now, onto this week's picks. Up first is a period true-crime drama from Narratively about the 1884 murder of Rhode Island’s richest Black businessman, and how the trial of his son-in-law ripped apart Newport’s enclave of wealthy African Americans. We’ve got an exclusive link to the story to allow Optionist readers to read it ahead of publication. We’ve also got: