Last year, Paramount Pictures bought the rights to Leanne Shaptons impressively wordily titled book, ‘Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry – Saturday, 14 February 2009, New York’. However since then we haven’t heard much about the movie adaptation, although that’s all changed thanks to a report from THR.
The studio is now putting gearing up on the adaptation by hiring Superbad and Adventureland director Greg Mottola to helm the movie. Not only that, but they’ve got some major talent interested too, with Brad Pitt and Natalie Portman attached to star. It’s only natural Pitt should want to be in it, as after The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford and The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, he seems to have a monoply on films with overly long titles.
The book is rather initrguing, with Shapton creating a fictions estate auction catalog, full of personal items and photographs. The 325 lots represent what is leftover from the four-year relationship between a photographer and a food columnist, with the book using its unusual set-up to explore what happened and the detritus left behind, which reveals the truth of what went on. The idea is to turn it into a romantic comedy, although retaining the flavour of the auction sale conceit.