Canadian author Robert Hough has completed negotiations with Neal Street Productions, a film development company based in London, England over the film rights to his first novel, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark. The Final Confession of Mabel Stark was first published in hardcover by Random House Canada and is now published in trade paperback by Vintage Canada. Neal Street Productions is the company run, in part, by Oscar winning (”American Beauty”) film director Sam Mendes together with his producing partner, Pippa Harris.

The rights to Hough’s book were previously optioned to another London-based production company, which garnered the interest of four-time Oscar nominated Kate Winslet to play the role of Mabel Stark, a tiger trainer who starred in the Ringling Brothers Circus of the 1920s. After that option lapsed last year, Hough’s Canadian film agent, Debbie Wood of Westwood Creative Artists, alerted Neal Street Productions, in no small part because Sam Mendes is married to Winslet.

Anne Collins, Robert Hough’s Canadian publisher and editor says: “Robert Hough is one of our most original, inventive and empathetic fiction writers, and everyone should have a chance to meet Mabel Stark of Rob’s novel, a woman who married six times but preferred her tigers. I can’t wait to see her on the screen.”

Negotiations started in the spring of 2006, and were finalized just prior to the New Year.

Italian writer Francesca Marciano has been hired as screenwriter; her last film, “La Bestia Nel Cuore,” was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign-language feature. According to sources within Neal Street, Mendes will decide whether to direct the movie, or act as one of the producers, upon deliverance of the script. The movie is tentatively scheduled to shoot in 2008.

Robert Hough’s second novel, The Stowaway, was also published by Random House Canada in hardcover and is published by Vintage Canada in trade paperback. The film rights to that novel remain available. In September 2007 Random House Canada will publish Hough’s new novel, The Culprits, which describes what happens when a Canadian lonelyheart taps into a website called fromrussiawithlove.com and, through his Russian email-ordered bride, ends up inadvertently funding a terrorist act.

Both The Final Confession of Mabel Stark and The Stowaway were published internationally.

Source: CNW Group

 

Posted by: laincoubert

Posted in: News > Role Rumours

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