Fall From Grace: The 30-Year-Secret of Neil Goldschmidt
The work has been done and the final revisions have been turned into the network for their ultimate "go-no go" decision. Honestly, I don't think I've ever worked harder on a film project than I have this one. From the moment I heard about the breaking story, I tracked down the rights, shopped it, sold it, and then went out and interviewed as many of the principles as humanly possible. This is a story I've got down cold.
The executives at USA Network are real fans of both the project and the script, but have to deal with their in-house reality that the network has been steadily de-emphasizing movies in favor of series and limited series. Still, Fall From Grace is one of the few movie projects they've hung onto -- which means the baton is rapidly passing from my hands as a screenwriter into theirs as executives as to whether or not this project is going to be greenlit and made eventually.
Have you ever had a person who you admired greatly, honestly felt they could do no wrong, and then learned something terrible about them? Something so shocking that you couldn't just write it off to them being "human" because it crossed so far over the line?
That's how I feel about Neil Goldschmidt. Fall From Grace is a true story that happened in my home state of Oregon back when I was growing up there but it has already had some profound national reverberations including winning the Pulitzer Prize for the journalist who first broke the story.
And guess what? That story won the journalist who wrote it, Nigel Jaquiss, the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism just last April. I optioned the rights to the Willamette Week's journalism a year ago. This is sort of like picking a stock before it splits. It has now become, without question, a nationally recognized story.
Goldschmidt's story (and that of his victim) makes for compelling drama but so, too, does the story behind the story of Jaquiss getting the goods on something that had been swept under the rug for three decades. It's David-and-Goliath time as this small alt.weekly newspaper beats the monolithic daily newspaper at its own game. Jaquiss and his editor, Mark Zusman, had to break down a wall of silence that had stood strong for three decades. They were legitimately concerned that the whole thing could end up taking down the entire newspaper.
Like a lot of other Oregonians, I was a fan of the public Goldschmidt who fixed the transportation system and brought new life to the city's downtown. Yet, at the same time, the seduction of power also was preventing key people from blowing the whistle on behavior that was, there's no other word for it, criminal.
This is one hell of a story, and it's a powerful script. The production company is Von Zerneck-Sertner and if it is greenlit, I'll exec produce along with Frank von Zerneck and Bob Sertner. In the "Small World Department", von Zerneck and Sertner are the producers of "Category 7" which is scheduled on CBS opposite my "The Poseidon Adventure" on NBC, on November 20.
Fingers crossed -- will keep you posted...
