It has been many months since we last heard about Chermin Entertainment’s planned adaptation of Marisha Pessl’s thriller novel Night Film, and I was starting to worry that nothing was happening with it. Deadline has buoyed my spirits by reporting a screenwriter has been hired for the project, and it’s Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, whose first feature credit will come next month when Kimberly Pierce’s remake of Carrie hits theaters. I really, really want to hope that script comes out as more than just a haphazard carbon copy of Brian De Palma’s original film. I’m telekinetically crossing all of your fingers.
Night Film is set to be directed by Rupert Wyatt, who pleased audiences with the Brian Cox-led crime drama The Escapist, and the surprisingly awesome “James Franco plays with monkeys” thriller Rise of the Planet of the Apes. For both of those films, he worked with screenwriters who only had one or two films produced, and turned both of those scripts into something memorable. It stands to reason he’s a good fit for any screenwriter, so the scary ball is in Aguirre-Sacasa’s horror court, or something.
Night Film, which was just published on August 20 by Random House, centers on an investigative journalist named Scott McGrath who probes into the suicide of a young woman because he thinks someone else was at fault for her death. It turns out her father is a reclusive horror filmmaker who hasn’t been seen in thirty years, and that somehow leads McGrath to think that the daughter’s murder was in revenge. I haven’t read it yet, though I cannot wait, as Pessl’s debut was 2006’s masterpiece Special Topics in Calamity Physics.
I don't dare have doubt in Aguirre-Sacasa, who already has one of the more interesting resumes out there, moving onto Carrie after writing episodes of Glee and Big Love. He’s also penned the Ryan Murphy-produced remake of The Town That Dreaded Sunshine from director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. He’s also writing the potential Archie feature based on the comics. His work doesn’t just end in film and TV though, as he was one of the writers who turned the musical Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark from a huge punchline to a more successful punchline. He also wrote the book for the Broadway transfer of Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike. It seems like all that’s left for him to do is release a popular, high-selling album, and the EGOT is surely his.
It’ll probably be a while before this one hits the production stage, so in the meantime, go check out Carrie on October 18 and tell me how it is, since I’ll probably be at home not watching it. Here’s the preview.
