While the current economic situation means Hollywood is making fewer big deals on spec scripts than it once did, that doesn’t mean a bidding war doesn’t erupt ocassionally. That’s what happened with David Guggenheim’s Safe House, which hit the market on Monday, got swept up in a fierce competition to buy it and ended up at Universal on Tuesday morning, which paid a mid six-figure sum to acquire it.
Hopefully it’s a good as the bidding war suggests. Variety says the film centres on a young housesitter of a CIA-run safe house. He must help a criminal escape to another safe location after the first house is detroyed by villains who want the witness dead. Although it sounds pretty generic (after all, haven’t most TV police shows done an episode that’s about something like this?), Universal must have seen a lot of potential in the script to stump up the cash.
It’s writer Dave Guggenheim’s first foray in film, as his day job is as a senior editor on the magazine US Weekly. However it probably didn’t hurt that his brothers are TV writer/producer Marc Guggenheim (CSI: Miami, Brothers & Sisters, Flashforward) and screewriter Eric Guggenheim (Miracle).