Act Naturally

Okay, check THIS out! "Paramount Pictures has acquired screen rights to the Joshua Foer book "Moonwalking With Einstein" in a preemptive deal and will develop it as a potential directing vehicle for Nacho Libre scribe Mike White.

Variety says the book is set for publication by Penguin in late 2009, and the rights to it were auctioned on the basis of a proposal.

Foer is writing his own story. A young journalist who discovered there was a world of competitive memorizers, Foer spent a year learning the techniques and became a competitor who won both the U.S. and World Memory Championships."

Now, if we ignore for a moment the involvement of the Nacho Libre guy, who would presumably interpret it as a hilarious gross-out comedy subtitled "War of the Nerds", I think there's definitely potential in turning that (future bestselling) book into a movie. Obviously, as the paragraphs above suggest, we'd need to make a few alterations to the way things actually happened, such as changing things so that Josh in fact won the World Memory Championship last year, and to make it more realistic there'd have to be a bit of added action, drama and sex, of course. And I'd have to be the bad guy, because in American movies it's the law that the Englishman is the villain. So I think it would go something like this:

Intrepid reporter Joshua Foer (Brad Pitt) uncovers evidence of a major terrorist conspiracy within the World Memory Championship. To investigate, he enlists the help of eccentric scientist Edward Cooke (Eric Idle) and gorgeous Austrian memory expert, swimsuit model and part-time secret agent Astrid Plessl (Nicole Kidman) to train as a memory master. [I don't think Josh has ever met Astrid, but every movie needs a love interest] After a variety of high-speed car chases, naked wrestling and reciting pi to 100,000 places, it turns out that the villain isn't sinister cult leader Tony Buzan (Ian McKellen) or macho German mastermind Clemens Mayer (Arnold Schwarzenegger), but snide nasty English memory man Ben Pridemore (Alan Rickman) who has memorised the zillion-figure code to hack into the world's nuclear arsenals and blow up the President of the USA. Fortunately, in a tense finale, Joshua recalls that during training he memorised the zillion-and-three-figure code to turn the nuclear missiles back off again. He recites it flawlessly, and in the process wins the World Memory Championships as well as saving the world.

I expect royalties for this.