Coram Boy: The Movie

Alan Parker will direct and write "Coram Boy," the feature version of Jamila Gavin's novel with Scott Rudin and Allison Owen producing.
Adaptation has been set as a co-production of Scott Rudin Prods., Owen's Ruby Films and BBC Films, in partnership with Miramax and the U.K. Film Council.

Novel, winner of the Whitbread Children's Book Award, is an epic adventure about two orphans -- one rescued from an African slave ship, the other the abandoned son of the heir to a great estate. The duo are raised in Britain's Coram hospice in 1741.

Novel was separately turned into a play by Helen Edmundson that was a hit at London's National Theater and has just opened on Broadway.

Actually, it just closed on Broadway... and not "just." It couldn't even hold on til the Tonys (where it was nominated for, but did not win, best play). I blame the marketing (people just didn't know what they'd be getting if they went in there, so they didn't go in), because word of mouth was uniformly fantastic. Well, maybe not uniformly--My buddy Chris didn't care for it, but eveyrone else I know who saw it, including myself, was pretty much blown away.

Coram Boy (the play) was meaty, scary, funny, touching, disturbing -- a true Dickensian yarn on stage (and it was apparently the most expensive non-musical ever produced on Broadway, which is evident from the brilliant staging). It will make a great movie... if they do it right.