As part of his on-going efforts to take over Hollywood, Star Trek director JJ Abrams has signed up to produce a new film based on Colum McCann’s novel, Let the Great World Spin, which recently won the National Book Award.
THR reports that Abrams is currently working on a rights deal, for an eventual film that he would produce and which Paramount would fund. However less certain is how they would actually make a movie out of the book. It’s a sprawling period piece, with numerous characters trying to survive in New York, amidst a backdrop of degradation and tragedy, all built around Philippe Petit’s infamous high-wire walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center in August 1974, as chronicled in the excellent documentary, Man On Wire.
With plot strands involving a young Irish monk living among prostitutes in the Bronx, a group of mothers mourning their sons who were killed in Vietnam, and a 38-year-old grandmother walking the streets with her teenage daughter, they’ll certainly have to condense a lot of the book to make a movie version. However with the link to Petit and the fact that the book is highly praised and serves as an allegory for 9/11 and its aftermath, you can see why Abrams would be interested.
Unfortunately though, we wouldn’t be shocked if this ended up on the long-life of critically lauded novels that people have tried to bring to the screen and failed.