The Gotham Group and Chariot Entertainment have teamed to option an upcoming young adult novel that imagines a United States in which American Muslims are interned.
“Internment is the book of my heart — written out of fear, but also hope,” said Ahmed, whose debut novel Love, Hate & Other Filters became a New York Timesbest-seller in January. “I’m thrilled to be working with Gotham and Chariot, who I know will do justice to Layla’s story as they bring it to life.”
The two production companies are eyeing Internment as a feature, although a limited series is possible. Gotham Group previously found YA adaptation success with the Maze Runner franchise. The management-production company also produced last year’s indie drama Kodachrome, starring Ed Harris, Jason Sudeikis and Elizabeth Olsen. Chariot was launched by veteran producer-manager Ahmos Hassan last year to develop film and television projects that can represent Muslims in a more realistic and accurate light.
“Samira’s admirable novel is an important one for a critical time in our country,” said Hassan. “I’m delighted to be working with such socially conscious partners at the Gotham Group to bring it to the screen.”
Ahmed is repped by Paradigm on behalf of P.S. Literary Agency’s Eric Smith.
Outside, the magazine which has published feature articles that were the basis for both film and television projects such as Everest, The Perfect Storm, Into the Wild, Blue Crush and 127 Hours, has just teamed up with The Gotham Group for representation for film and television. Outside Studios will produce content for film, television and new media for what will be different platforms and distributors. Outside, which began in 1977 and is owned by the Mariah Media Network, is also known as the only magazine to have won three consecutive National Magazine Awards for general excellence.
If you add up the box office for those aforementioned feature projects alone, it totals ovver $700M worldwide. Larry Burke (
“Over the last few weeks, we’ve met with many smart and visionary executives at the studios, streaming services and broadcast outlets. With the incredible guidance and expertise of Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and her team at The Gotham Group, I’m confident that Outside Studios will be a major content provider in the entertainment sector,” said Burke who is also Outside‘s Editor-in-Chief. “In addition to our award-winning articles in print, we’re already producing over 300 stories a month for our digital platform … those two content streams provide a rich portfolio of ideas for potential film and television projects. Outside’s legacy has always been rooted in award-winning, long form journalism involving survival, heroism, human endurance, natural disaster, adventure, and a celebration of the human spirit.”
Outside also publishes the Outside Buyer’s Guides, Outside Online, the Outside Podcast, Outside Television, Outside Events, Outside+ App (also available on Google Play), Outside Books, and Outside GO, a revolutionary, 21st-century adventure-travel company. They reach — wait for it — 38M consumers every month through their many branded projects.
Burke has grown the brand exponentially since the late 1970s. The original founders for the magazine was Jann Wenner, William Randolph Hearst III and Jack Ford (son of the former U.S. President) but then they sold it off to Burke who then merged it with his already existing title Mariah magazine. (Why Mariah? “They call the wind Mariah” from the Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin western musical Paint Your Wagon).
Outside is all Burke and after it was under his wing, the magazine just took off, filling a niche for consumers interested in outdoor (and adventurous) lifestyles. Advertisers quickly sat up and took notice. So did readers. The magazine, whose motto is “Live Bravely,” flourished with the early introduction of smartly written, feature articles — some of those would end up starting the film and television careers of some of its freelance writers such as Sebastian Junger. The latest featured article in Outsidedelves into the story of Spanish athlete Kilian Jornet’s back-to-back Everest climbs and the questions swirling around the athlete could have possibly accomplished it.
The move to join with a company like The Gotham Group almost seemed inevitable given the way the brand has been expanding over the years. The magazine’s circulation is currently 675K with an audience and share size estimated at 2.4 million.
For The Gotham Group, it’s clientele in publishing and comics is significant and Outside is another biggie. Other clients include Village Voice Media, Dark Horse Entertainment, Simon & Schuster’s Children’s and Young Adult libraries, Gallery/Scout Books, HarperCollins U.K., Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Bloomsbury/Walker US Children’s libraries, Penguin Young Readers Group, Marshall Cavendish, Abrams and Com.x. In addition, Gotham develops original IP product with such publishers as Diversion, Little, Brown & Company, Sourcebooks and Abrams and serves as co-agent to over 50 individual literary agencies around the world.
From those relationships have come both The Spiderwick Chronicles and the Maze Runner franchise. Gotham also produced Kodachrome with Jason Sudeikis, Elizabeth Olsen, and Ed Harris, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was released theatrically by Netflix; Stephanie, directed by Akiva Goldsman; The Big Game, which chronicles the phenomenon of daily fantasy sports; and Train Man, about Darius McCollum, the New Yorker who became notorious for driving subway trains illegally.
On the television side, Gotham has Star Trek’s Zachary Quinto set to star in and executive produce Biopunk and is developing Randi Zuckerberg’s New York Times‘ bestselling book Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives as a series. The company most recently optioned film rights to Ruth Ware’s The Lying Game, which debuted at number three on the New York Times‘ bestseller list; Janelle Brown’s suspense thriller Watch Me Disappear, and Robyn Harding’s bestseller The Party. Gotham is also producing Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10 horror novels.
Wes Ball’s Oddball Productions and the Gotham Group are teaming up on a movie project based on Brendan Deneen’s horror novel “The Chrysalis.”
The novel centers on a twentysomething couple who are forced out of New York City and buy an old house in the suburbs, where the husband gets a big-bucks corporate job and the pregnant wife opens a small gym catering to moms-to-be. They make friends despite their worries about becoming boring suburbanites. But they also discover something growing in the basement, which begins to slowly destroy their lives.
The novel, which will be published in September, is described as “The Shining” meets “Alien.” Deneen has written “The Ninth Circle,” “Mortimer The Lazy Bird” and a variety of “Flash Gordon” titles.
No decision has been made on cast or a director.
Ball and Gotham Group’s Ellen Goldsmith-Vein have teamed on each installment of the “Maze Runner” franchise, based on the dystopian science-fiction book trilogy written by James Dashner. The third film, “Maze Runner: The Death Cure,” stars Dylan O’Brien and Kaya Scodelario and opens Jan. 26. Ball has directed all three movie in the “Maze Runner” trilogy. He served as a producer on the last two, along with Goldsmith-Vein, Wyck Godfrey, Marty Bowen, and Lee Stollman.