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Sunday
13Dec2009

J.J. Abrams Picks Up Novel 'Let the Great World Spin'

DateSunday, December 13, 2009 at 2:54AM
J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot have acquired the rights to Let the Great World Spin, which won author Colum McCann the National Book Award last month. The judges for that award said McCann's work is "an ecstatic vision of the human courage required to stay aloft above the ever-yawning abyss," and USA Today summarized the novel as "a portrait of a decaying 1974 New York."

It's a book with many individual stories, and the connecting thread is more of a wire. In fact, that's exactly what it is: The unifying event in Great World is Philippe Petit's high-wire walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center in August of that year. That should sound familiar. Petit's story was chronicled in last year's Oscar-winning documentary, Man on Wire.

The strength of the story, apparently, is an allegorical connection to a New York City in the wake of September 11th. In announcing the Bad Robot acquisition, The Hollywood Reporter lists the book's central characters: "A young Irish monk living among prostitutes in the Bronx; a group of mothers mourning their sons, killed in Vietnam, in a Park Avenue apartment; and a 38-year-old grandmother walking the streets with her teenage daughter."

Bad Robot is on a hot streak right now, and it doesn't have everything to do with Star Trek, one of the year's biggest movies, and one of the best-reviewed blockbusters of 2009. We'll see more from Team Abrams next year, with the newsroom romcom Morning Glory joining the company's TV charges, Lost and Fringe. And Trek and Mission: Impossible sequels are also in the hopper, as is Cloverfield 2...we think.

Abrams also continues to build projects for other directors, so I don't think we'll see him behind the camera for Let the Great World Spin, but who knows. Maybe he'll want to leave sci-fi behind for a while and give more "serious" subject matter a go.

AuthorColin Boyd | | in , | Print ArticlePrint Article | | CommentPost a Comment |

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