KatzSmith Productions Acquires Film Rights to Doug Dorst’s Alive in Necropolis
EW.com
http://insidemovies.ew.com/2011/10/19/alive-in-necropolis-movie/
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Another book to film adaptation is on its way, and finally it’s one that appears to be geared toward adults rather than the ubiquitous tweener crowd. Read on for the details of KatzSmith Productions’ acquisition of Doug Dorst’s Alive in Necropolis, set in the “cemetery city” of Colma, California.
According to EW.com David Katzenberg and Seth Grahame-Smith, the partners behind KatzSmith Productions, were hooked on Dorst’s 2008 debut novel Alive in Necropolis, a noirish detective story set in the real-life cemetery-filled town of Colma, because it’s so character-driven. The producers are aiming to give it a Chinatown or Se7en vibe, joined with the creepiness of The Sixth Sense.
Starting in the 1920s, “[Colma] was founded when people in San Francisco realized they were running out of real estate,” says Grahame-Smith, screenwriter of Tim Burton’s upcoming Dark Shadows and author of the books Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. “They exhumed all the bodies and graveyard markers to this town, making it basically a kind of city of the dead.”
“The book is about a murder mystery, told through the eyes of a young detective who may or may not be going crazy and may or may not be seeing ghosts that are helping him,” Grahame-Smith adds. “It’s a very rainy streets, brooding, straightforward supernatural thriller.”
“We’re definitely drawn to character-driven ideas. It starts with the characters and starts with the writing,” says Katzenberg, who previously worked as a producer with reality guru Mark Burnett on “Survivor” and other shows before making his mark as a director with MTV’s “Awkward” and the raunchy high school comedy series “The Hard Times of RJ Berger”, which he created with Grahame-Smith.
Look for more soon!
Book Synopsis via Penguin Publishing:
Colma, California, the “cemetery city” serving San Francisco, is the resting place of the likes of Joe DiMaggio, Wyatt Earp, and William Randolph Hearst. It is also the home of Michael Mercer, a by-the-book rookie cop struggling to settle comfortably into adult life. Instead, he becomes obsessed with the mysterious fate of his predecessor, Sergeant Wes Featherstone, who spent his last years policing the dead as well as the living. As Mercer attempts to navigate the drama of his own daily life, his own grip on reality starts to slip — either that or Colma’s more famous residents are not resting in peace as they should be.
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