Sci-Fi Film and Television Developments

Lost City of Z
2/4/09 – SCI FI Wire reported that director James Gray is a developing a film, The Lost City of Z, based on the life of Percy Harrison Fawcett, inspired by David Grann's book, to star Brad Pitt. Fawcett was on an assignment to establish the border between Bolivia and Brazil when he heard the legends of El Dorado, the lost city of gold, and quit his day job to go adventuring.  "People don't realize what recent history the mapping of the world is," Gray said. "He went down there and rather quickly lost his appetite for mapping, which he did with wonderful success. He became obsessed with archaeological issues and, to be direct about it, went quite mad."  Gray added that he is three-fourths of the way through his first draft of the script and expects to present it to Pitt in two months.

03/31/08 - Paramount Pictures has pre-emptively bought Lost City of Z, a David Grann manuscript about the search for a lost city in the Amazon, with Brad Pitt to produce the feature adaptation through his Plan B company.  Grann's forthcoming nonfiction book concerns British explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett, who was attempting to find the so-called City of Z when he and his party disappeared in 1925. Over the next 70 years, scores of explorers tried and failed to retrace Fawcett's path, including a 1996 expedition of Brazilian adventurers. Pitt would play Fawcett.

AlienAlmanac.com   2009