Graham King’s Initial Entertainment Group has bought the film rights to three novels for Johnny Depp’s production company, Infinitum Nihil. Variety says Depp’s company and King will co-produce all three for Warner Bros. Pictures under King’s deal with the studio.
Warner Bros. and Initial have also hired writer D.V. DeVincentis (Grosse Point Blank, High Fidelity) to adapt Nick Hornby’s darkly comic “A Long Way Down” for Depp’s Infinitum Nihil.
Infinitum was careful to stress that Depp isn’t attached to star in the four projects. At the same time, any project set up at an actor’s vanity shingle has the potential to turn into a starring vehicle.
Initial and Infinitum are in talks with Peter Medak (Romeo is Bleeding) to direct the film version of Joseph Gangemi’s novel “Inamorata“, adapted by the author. Set in Philadelphia in the 1920s, the book revolves around a Harvard graduate student who falls in love with a beautiful psychic whom he is attempting to discredit as a fraud.
The two companies have scooped up film rights to “Affected Provincial’s Companion“, a compendium of essays, diagrams and poetry written, designed and illustrated by Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy as a treatise on the value of being a refined gentleman in today’s unrefined world.
The third book is journalist-author James Meek’s “The People’s Act of Love“, set in 1919 Siberia. The storyline revolves around an escapee from a Russian prison camp who stumbles upon a Christian sect.
The story for “A Long Way Down” follows four desperate people who meet on New Year’s Eve and form a surrogate family. [CommingSoon]