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EXCLUSIVE: Oscar-winning Nomadland producer Peter Spears has optioned Mike Nichols: A Life, the 2021 biography of the director by Mark Harris, for development as a dramatic feature film.
The planned adaptation of the book, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, will not be a cradle-to-grave biography but instead will focus on a young Nichols as he journeys from Broadway to Hollywood to make his first film, 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, depicting his high-stakes collaboration with the film’s two married stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
Spears will develop the film for his production company Cor Cordium. His other producing credits include the Oscar-winning Call Me by Your Name (2017) and Bones and All (2022) as well as On Swift Horses with Jacob Elordi, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Diego Calva and Will Poulter, which will open later this year. Harris is also the author of Pictures at a Revolution (2008) and the World War II filmmaking history Five Came Back (2014) as well as its Emmy-winning 2017 Netflix adaptation.
“Mark’s book captures the moment that a first-time filmmaker found himself thrust into a front-row seat for one of the most scandalous love affairs ever to rock Hollywood, indeed, the entire world, a time when Taylor and Burton were on the front page of every newspaper, and denounced on the floor of Congress and in the halls of the Vatican,” Spears said. “In the rehearsal room, Mike Nichols told his stars, ‘It’s us against the world.’ All three of them felt they had something to prove, and they proved it in a moviemaking experience that turned out to be dramatic, funny, tempestuous, and moving.”
Said Harris: “I love and admire Peter’s work, and I couldn’t be happier to place this crucial moment in the lives of Nichols, Taylor, and Burton in his hands.”
Harris is represented by CAA and The Wylie Agency.
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