Recent Highlights: Game-Changing Strikers, a Trailblazing War Journo, Olympic-Bound Refugees
➕ With the writers strike over, now's the time to find your next project
We haven’t done this in a while but I thought it would be fun to highlight some of the picks that have been featured in The Optionist recently for new readers who aren’t paid subscribers, especially with the end of the writers strike and the return to production on the horizon. (Fingers crossed the actors reach a deal quickly.) Now’s the time to look ahead to the future.
There’s so much good stuff in The Optionist each week and the teases don’t do justice to the material. More than just a series of loglines, The Optionist offers a thoughtful selection of new and available IP. Our recommendations take into account character arcs, world-building, the author and competing projects and give you all the needed information. Not only do I spotlight material you might want to develop; it’s your quick guide to what’s going to be landing on your friends’ and competitors’ desks.
I picked out half a dozen potential projects we featured over the summer to highlight what The Optionist does. They’re also favorites of mine. The list spans current events, history, workplace comedy, a YA adventure romp and a backlist title in the form of a beloved children’s classic. But I wanted to start with a selection from last year because of the autoworkers strike. It takes us back to 1936 when a daring and innovative group of autoworkers took on the two most powerful companies in America and won, changing history in the process. It is an incredibly compelling and dramatic story.
History/Drama
For fans of Band of Brothers
Potential logline: The gripping drama of how an unlikely group of workers took on the biggest company in the world and won, changing history in the process.
Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike that Created the Middle Class by Edward McClelland (Beacon Press, 2021) The 1936 Flint Sit-Down Strike is really one of the most stirring and I think cinematic events in the last 100 years but it’s almost totally forgotten. In Dec. 1936, a motley crew of workers welded the doors shut to the GM plant in Flint, Mich. and went on strike with the innovative idea of occupying the plant rather than picketing (to prevent GM from assaulting them and bringing in strikebreakers). For 44 days they occupied the plant, electing a "mayor" and setting up a kangaroo court to enforce discipline. They repelled attempts by GM thugs to storm the plant. Outside, a women's auxiliary kept them fed (and also helped repel the thugs). This is a story that goes from the ramshackle homes where organizers plotted the strike to the halls of power where the President himself got involved in brokering a compromise. There's a great sprawling cast of characters that populate this story: President Franklin Roosevelt; Michigan Governor Frank Murphy, who took office just after the strike started and made a crucial decision not to use the National Guard to side with GM (and was rewarded with a seat on the Supreme Court); Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, the first female in the cabinet who mediated the negotiations; larger than life labor leaders like John L. Lewis and the Reuther brothers; and a classic villain in Alfred Sloan, a business genius who made GM the biggest company in the world, but lived in a rarefied New York stratosphere and was comically out of touch. And then there are the strikers: soft-spoken Bob Travis, just 30 but already a seasoned strike vet who commanded respect for the force of his personality; Henry Kraus, the medieval art historian-turned-labor organizer; his wife, Dorothy, who organized the Women's Auxiliary (and don't let the name fool you there was nothing auxiliary about them). Without the women, the strike would have been lost. This is truly an epic story. Think of it like a Band of Brothers for workers where the history is rooted in the camaraderie and bonding of the troops on the front lines. REPS: Straus Literary
If the idea interests you and you want to know more, ping me. There are multiple ways into this story and I’ll be happy to generate a custom memo running down the different options. (Hey, that PhD in American history is good for something.)
Crypto/Satire/Dark Comedy
For fans of The Big Short
Potential logline: One journalist’s journey down the crypto rabbit hole as he goes from Sam Bankman-Fried’s Bahamian office to a crypto-mining operation in Cambodia to a party on a yacht celebrating an NFT to figure out if it’s a folly or the future of money.
Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux (Crown, Sept.) The rise and fall of crypto is such a rich story that I think it's possible more than one project could come out of it. What I like about this story from Businessweek senior writer Faux is how it leans into the absurdity of crypto, playing it as a dark comedy. I also like how Faux uses himself as a narrator and becomes a proxy for the audience's POV, explaining crypto, which remains tricky to understand. We see how an argument with a high-school friend who has just invested a few grand in Dogecoin about whether crypto was a scam or the future of money set Faux on a multi-year quest. The journey took him from a yacht party celebrating Apefest (remember the Bored Ape NFT hype?) with Snoop Dogg to the Philippines, where a Pokemon-esque game/crypto mining program had become a sensation, to a crypto-fueled human trafficking operation in Cambodia to El Salvador. Along the way, he meets some fascinating characters like Jason Stone, the crypto trader and Bored Ape hype man, Sam Bankman-Fried (they hang out at SBF's Bahamian penthouse) and Mighty Ducks actor-turned-crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, self-styled as a billionaire hippie crypto king who also has self-aggrandizing dreams of turning Puerto Rico into a crypto paradise and becoming a senator or even president (🤦🏼♂️). Numbers Go Up could be the basis for a Big Short-like exploration of crypto, but one with a strong narrative arc that starts, as Faux does, with the argument with his high school buddy and ends with the collapse of SBF's empire. (I would actually button an adaptation by coming back to the original argument and friend.) Among the many different crypto books, I think this is a promising one to consider for that reason and something that could be distinct from other crypto projects in development. REPS: Will Watkins/CAA
Thriller
For fans of Zorro and Harry Potter
Potential logline: In colonial Mexico, a young girl uses her magical powers and shape-shifting ability to become a masked hero, inspiring the local people to rise up against their Spanish masters.
Sun of Blood and Ruin by Mariely Lares (Harper Voyager, Feb.) There’s a lot of promising world-building in this gender-swapped Zorro retelling that adds layers of Mesoamerican mythology and magic to the story. (The way Lares did this reminded me a little of how Marvel re-worked Namor as coming out of Mesoamerican and not vaguely Greek/Roman mythology — a change I loved even as a diehard Namor fan since I first started reading comics.) In an alt version of Spanish-ruled colonial Mexico, teen Leonora de las Casas Tlazohtzin has been promised to the heir to the Spanish throne. She’s also a masked vigilante, a Robin Hood type fighting for the people, called Pantera, who can shapeshift and wield other kinds of powerful magic. She rallies the indigenous people to fight the colonizing Spanish who are trying to snuff out the local magic. There are tons of cool mythical and fantastical creatures in this world. The comp isn’t perfect but you can catch the Harry Potter vibe in the magic, young protagonist, coming of age narrative and fantastical creatures. You could build an ongoing series in this world and around this character that is part action-adventure, part coming-of-age story and part fantasy thrill-ride, full of romance and swashbuckling action. Loved it, though I recognize the period setting and potential SFX might discourage some. I would just say that this is basically a Western in setting, an easier lift than recreating other periods and, while there's a big-budget version of this stuffed with special effects, I think there's an ongoing series that could be more economical. REPS: Kimberly Guidone/Storm Literary
Comedy/Satire
For fans of Midnight Run and Thelma & Louise
Potential logline: A disgraced journalist robs a bank, kidnaps a teller and goes on a road trip to get revenge on those who wronged him.
America Fantastica by Tim O'Brien (Mariner Books, Oct.) Any list of the most important American writers since World War II has to include Tim O’Brien. My personal shortlist of the best books during this period starts with Invisible Man and The Things They Carried. O’Brien sorta reminds me of another well-known writer, the late Cormac McCarthy, who found success on the big screen elusive. But I think America Fantastica, O’Brien’s first new novel in two decades, could be his No Country For Old Men — that is, the adaptation that could finally break through. The spine of the story is essentially a road trip movie — a disgraced journalist-turned-department-store-manager robs a bank, kidnaps the teller and goes on the lam from Mexico to Minnesota, seeking revenge on those he thinks wronged him. Along the way, they encounter a fantastic cast of characters (cameo city!), including hitmen, ex-lovers and a mendacious billionaire. These characters are hilarious wacky American originals, like the psychopath who uses his resemblance to Matthew McConaughey to prey on people (like I said, cameo city), or the creep who seduces women with hot sauce (you gotta read it to get it). It’s a hilarious and painfully knowing satirical portrait of an America unraveling in the early 21st century. This is the kind of literary novel that can make the transition to screen well because of its adaptable road trip structure, humor and colorful characters. Also, I think it can be made relatively cheaply. Perfect for a director or writer looking for something that could be smart, funny and popular. REPS: Matthew Snyder/CAA
Dystopian/Thriller/Alt History
For fans of Handmaid’s Tale and Man in the High Castle
Potential logline: In an alt 1950s England, Germany won WWII, Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson are king and queen, and a woman sent to infiltrate a rebel group of middle-aged women begins to question the society she lives in.
Widowland by C. J. Carey (Quercus, June 2021) I really liked the premise and world-building in this piece of speculative fiction set in a 1950s England where the country became a protectorate of Germany instead of fighting WWII and Edward VII and Wallis Simpson are about to be coronated king and queen. It has obvious echoes to such great stuff as The Handmaid's Tale, The Man in the High Castle, and V for Vendetta — indeed my tongue-in-cheek description of this feminist dystopia is "(Wo)man in the High Castle." In this alt-history U.K., Rose Ransom works for the Ministry of Culture censoring classic English literature of what the Nazi-aligned regime thinks is problematic or subversive ideas. Ahead of a visit by Adolf Hitler, she's sent to Widowland, a ghetto near Oxford where childless women over 50 are segregated — women are strictly stratified according to their perceived societal worth, with fertile young women at the top and those older women at the bottom. Authorities think a group of them are responsible for seditious graffiti popping up around London that quotes banned female authors like Mary Shelley of Frankenstein fame. But once in Widowland, Rose starts to question everything she thinks she knows and believes in. The first book ends with the assassination of Edward and the sequel — Queen Wallis — picks up the story two years later with Simpson as queen, preparing for a visit from President Eisenhower. (Love this. Here's a take on Simpson we haven't really seen!) As I said, the world-building here is great, detailed and clever and the mix of feminist dystopia with a classic alt-history trope (Germany wins WWII) worked for me. It's easy to see these first two books unspooling across multiple seasons — setting up the world makes it feel like the first book should definitely be more than a single season. It depresses me, but this story also felt timely in its exploration of censoring books and efforts to control women's bodies and reproduction but in a way (a la The Handmaid's Tale) that allows it to dodge right-wing attacks. While this story definitely echoes earlier stuff, it was unique enough not to feel overly derivative to me. As I've said, my favorite note a TV writer friend got was to make something "same same but different" and this fulfills that credo. REPS: United Agents (U.K.)
History/Biopic/Drama
For fans of A Private War
Potential logline: The life of Maggie Higgins, the pioneering young female war correspondent who covered everything from the liberation of Dachau to the storming of the beach at Inchon to the Vietnam War and then died tragically at 45.
Fierce Ambition: The Life and Legend of War Correspondent Maggie Higgins by Jennet Conant (W.W. Norton, Oct.) Along with the previous entry (Sisterhood) here’s a great throwback story of an overlooked woman doing awesome things. This is another story that I assumed must’ve been adapted at some point, but I was surprised to find that was an incorrect assumption. (And, as the NYT pointed out a few years ago, Hollywood has mostly overlooked these trailblazing female correspondents.) The reason I thought her story had been brought to screen is that so many parts of what made Maggie Higgins a star journalist and a compelling character — the ambition, the disregard for danger, the muscling into a so-called man’s job, the sexual freedom — already feel like screen cliches. But Higgins was the original from which all these cliches were born. I think there’s an interesting way to play with and transcend those cliches in telling her story. And what a story. Born in 1920, she was one of the few women in her class at Columbia Journalism School (less than a dozen spots were “reserved” for women) and then still in her early twenties she covered the end of WWII for the New York Herald Tribune, becoming one of the first journalists into Dachau, which changed how she viewed the importance of her job. She went on to cover the Nuremberg War Trials, become the chief of the Berlin and Tokyo bureaus for the Herald Tribune, and then when the Korean War broke out, she headed there to cover it. She was the only female reporter to hit the beach at Inchon with the Marines. The cover image of the book was used in a 1950 Time magazine story that made her famous. In 1951, she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer for international reporting. She went back to war in the early 1960s — despite having two young children — to cover the conflict in Vietnam, where she engaged in a fierce rivalry with an up-and-coming young reporter named David Halberstam, who believed her fierce anti-communism blinded her to the weakness of the South Vietnamese regime. Sadly, Higgins died in 1966 at just 45, from a tropical disease contracted in Vietnam. Higgins’ beauty, success and sexual liberation contributed to the unfair innuendo that she traded sex for stories — a myth propagated by an early ‘50s novel about a female war correspondent many thought was based on her. But Higgins was widely admired by soldiers in the field — Douglas MacArthur once personally rescinded a ban on women on the front for Higgins, writing, “Ban on women correspondents in Korea has been lifted. Marguerite Higgins is held in highest professional esteem by everyone." What a fabulous story to bring to the screen. My only uncertainty is how. Do you try for an end-to-end biopic, or pull out a single episode to tell in detail? There are three moments I would focus on for the latter — WWII, Korea and Vietnam. Each could work, depending on your preferences. I like the idea of a comprehensive biopic. I think it allows for a better exploration of sexism, reveals how she managed to succeed in such a male-dominated space, opens up other scenes (like her friendship with John and Robert Kennedy) and highlights the tension between her domestic life of marriage and motherhood and her globe-trotting adventures. My biggest concern would be that the war parts would seem repetitive: Off to Germany! Off to Korea! Off to Vietnam! But these are solvable problems in the context of an awesome adventure story. REPS: ICM
Sports/Drama/Inspirational
For fans of Hoosiers with a dash of Cool Runnings
Potential logline: The incredible true story of how a former NBA star used his money to pull together a team of refugees from his native war-torn South Sudan to improbably make the Olympics.
“South Sudan earns Olympic berth as top African team at FIBA World Cup” by Brian Windhorst (ESPN, Sept. 2) This is an amazing and inspirational story about how South Sudan, a country that didn't exist until 2011 and is in a region that has been wracked by civil war and violent internal conflicts for more than 50 years, qualified for the Olympics in men's basketball with a team made of refugees and funded by a former NBA player. If you hop on it now, a doc could be ready for the start of the Paris Games in July of next year. I also think there's a scripted take that could be really compelling, something basically dramatic but with maybe just a little of that Cool Runnings comedic sensibility mixed in. The team is drawn from the Sudanese diaspora (Wenyen Gabriel grew up in New Hampshire by way of Egypt; Kacuol Dut Jok's journey was South Sudan-Uganda-Iowa), doesn't have a home court (there's exactly one indoor basketball court in South Sudan, and the team practices outside or in foreign countries), and is underwritten by Sudanese born, British-raised, Duke-educated former NBA All-Star Luol Deng, who took over the national program when he retired from the NBA in 2019. This is the first South Sudanese team to qualify for the Olympics in any sport — they sent two individual runners to compete in Tokyo. Recruiting African and African American basketball players who can act (or tall actors who can seriously hoop) could be tricky, but Winning Time shows that it can be done and done well. This is such a feel-good sports story — and one that I think will get loads of attention during the Olympics — that it feels like a no-brainer to me, especially a doc. REPS: ESPN's Brian Windhorst turned me on to the story but rather than optioning it, I would go right to Deng and the South Sudanese Olympic Committee.
Children’s/Fantasy/Adventure
For fans of One Piece, anything Miyazaki and Harry Potter
Potential logline: Four siblings head off on amazing adventures when one discovers a magical flying ship that can travel through time.
The Ship That Flew by Hilda Lewis (Oxford Children's Classics, 1998) This beloved children's classic — hence its inclusion in Oxford's series — was first published in 1939 and has been in print almost continuously since then. And I'm not the only one who loves it. No less a genius than Miyazaki put it on his list of his all-time favorite books, which isn’t surprising because there’s a lot of his spirit in the book. This could be the next One Piece. The basic plot has four siblings discovering a toy Viking longboat that can magically grow in size, fly and travel through time. (It's inspired by the Norse legend of Skidbladnir, which was owned by the god Frey.) The plot has them having all sorts of adventures traveling to the past with the ship. It's got everything: A magical ship, kids having an adventure in the grand tradition of British children’s stories, time travel, Robin Hood, Pharaohs and Norse gods. The vibe — magic only works if you believe and only the young have the naive innocence to truly believe — has real Willie Wonka and Harry Potter energy. There’s a real sense of wonder and awe in the discovery of the magic. There are so many ways to go here: A Miyazaki-like animated movie, live-action all ages or possibly an ongoing series — time travel makes it easy to go beyond the book's core adventures. As presented in the book, the kids are on the younger side but I think they can be aged up to be teens to make an adaptation more YA, if desired. Ditto with the setting on the English coast, which is timeless but with a period feel. I'd keep that. It's more fun without too much modern technology, though setting it in the present is an easy switch. Yes, I share the same name as the author, which is why I resisted including it in the Optionist until now. She's my great aunt (who was a well-known British author in her day), who first told this as bedtime story for her kids and my dad before turning it into a book. (Indeed, his first cousins are characters in it.) I first read it when I was about 10 — I have my dad's beaten-up 1939 first edition — and it has been one of my favorites ever since. Lest you think the fix is in, I don't have a stake in the rights. When dad’s cousin, Hilda's son, passed away a few years ago, he willed the rights to my brother who always believed the story belonged on the big screen. REPS: Ping me and I'll connect you
Workplace Comedy
For fans of Bull Durham, Major League and workplace comedies
Potential logline: A fresh-out-of-college grad takes the only sports job he’s offered — doing a little of everything for a minor league baseball club in Asheville, NC. He meets a fascinating cast of offbeat characters, has a series of hilarious misadventures and, of course, learns about life along the way.
Welcome to the Circus of Baseball by Ryan McGee (Doubleday, April) McGee's funny and charming memoir of his year working for the Asheville Tourists, a minor league baseball club, could be the basis for a quirky workplace sitcom or a coming-of-age movie. Fresh out of college, McGee dreams of working for ESPN, only to blow the big interview. He pivots by snagging a job with the minor league Asheville Tourists. It's a foot in the door to the world of sports, albeit one that pays only $100 a week. (On that salary McGee can only afford to live in a retirement community.) McGee knows nothing about running a team or a stadium, so everything is a learning experience, from filling the soft-serve machine (surprisingly tricky) to counting ticket sales (and getting it wrong) to overseeing mid-game entertainment like "Captain Dynamite and His Exploding Coffin of Death.” McGee captures the colorful Bull Durham-esque characters who populate the minor leagues, including the coach, nicknamed Tomatoes for his complexion, whose claim to fame was the ability to down a whole pizza and copious amounts of beer without removing his giant wad of chewing tobacco. He also has a great eye for the comedy of it all. His description of the mascot brawl that breaks out when fourteen of them gather on the field for the league's all-star game is worth the price of admission alone. There are tender moments in the book as well, such as when McGee takes the girl who runs the snow cone machine to the prom after her date stands her up, that give it a sweetness and heart. Asheville is the kind of beautiful, charming, offbeat town that makes a perfect setting for a show and opens up a wider world build-out. I lean toward doing this as an ongoing comedic series with McGee as the straight-man hero/audience POV akin to Jim Halpert in The Office. REPS: Sean Daily/Hotchkiss Daily
That’s a wrap for today. We’ll see you Friday for our regular roundup of the best optionable material out there.