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Exclusive: Echo Lake Entertainment has promoted longtime lit managers Amy Schiffman and Adam Riback to partners in the company’s management division. The pair joins current partners Zadoc Angell, Dave Brown, Iris Grossman, Peter McGrath and Amotz Zakai.

Schiffman joined Echo Lake in 2018, after serving as a partner at Intellectual Property Group. Prior to that, she headed up the intellectual property divisions of both Gersh and William Morris. A member of non-profit arts advocacy group Board of Arts for LA, she specializes in selling books to film and television and also reps writers and directors working in film and TV.

Riback is a manager and producer who started at ICM before segueing into the world of management at Management 360. He joined Echo Lake in 2016 and reps an eclectic and diverse list of creators spanning across all media. His producing credits include Yuval Adler’s post-wwii thriller The Secrets We Keep starring Joel Kinnaman,...

I have been tracking producer Sol Bondy since 2016 when co-production The Happiest Day in the Life of Ölli Mäki won the Un Certain Regard Grand Prize and the European Film Award for Best Debut. He and Fred Burle have been developing The Girl from Köln (aka Köln 75) with writer-director Ido Fluk, the filmmaker behind 2016 Tribeca selection The Ticket since 2019. "This project has been very close to our hearts in the last few years and we're very excited with the way it's been shaped so far," said Bondy, a Variety Producer to Watch in 2018. "It's been such a joy working with Ido on this exciting story and we're thrilled to have put an amazing team together," added Burle, Brazilian born producer who was just made a partner in One Two Films, alongside co-founders Sol Bondy and Christoph Lange. Burle joined One Two in January 2017, having graduated from the German Film and Television Academy (dffb) the previous year. He has previously worked as a film critic, at The Match Factory, and as curator of the inaugural dffb film festival. One Two Films has produced and co-produced award-winning films such as Holy Spider (Read my blog about it here), Vadim Perelman's Persian Lessons (Read my blog about it here), Jennifer Fox's Sundance breakout The Tale, Isabel Coixet's The Bookshop and Juho Kuosmanen's The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki.Other titles in the pipeline include Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurdsson's dark comedy Northern Comfort, which premieres in SXSW later this month, Annemarie Jacir's survival drama The Oblivion Theory, Sarah Arnold's debut feature Wild Encounters and Michiel ten Horn's romantic comedy Any Other Night. In Berlin this year it was announced that Bankside would be The Girl from Köln's international sales agent and was launching sales. Alamode Film already has German-speaking territories and is a coproducer, who have very recently secured funding through the Fff, the local fund in Bavaria. It is in early pre-production and will shoot this year in Poland and Germany. The Girl from Köln tells the little-known story of Vera Brandes, who, in 1975, at the age of 17, staged the famous Köln Concert by jazz musician Keith Jarrett, which became the top-selling jazz solo album of all time. With Polish Film Institute backing, Oscar-winning Polish producer Ewa Puszczynska (Ida, Cold War) of Extreme Emotions is co-producing along with Annegret Weitkämper-Krug of Germany's Gretchenfilm (Seneca). Oscar nominee and Emmy winner Oren Moverman (Love & Mercy, Bad Education) serves as executive producer. Moverman also produced Fluk's previous feature, The Ticket. The Tale writer-director Jennifer Fox also serves as executive producer. Stephen Kelliher and Sophie Green executive produce for Bankside. It stars Mala Emde (Skin Deep, And Tomorrow the Entire World) in the lead role, alongside John Magaro (Past Lives) as Jarrett. Magaro was also in Cannes last year with Kelly Reichardt's competition title Showing Up.Other cast attached include Alexander Scheer (Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush), Ulrich Tukur (The Life of Others), Susanne Wolff (Sisi & I, Styx), Jördis Triebel (Dark), Jan Bülow (Lindenberg) and Marie-Lou Sellem (Tar, Exit Marrakesh). The NYU-graduate Fluk was dubbed "a talent to watch" by Variety following his feature debut Never Too Late, the first crowd-sourced Israeli film ever made. His American debut, the Tribeca competition selection, The Ticket, starred Dan Stevens and Malin Akerman. Upcoming projects include 24 Hours in June, a retelling of the final day in the life of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were convicted of spying on behalf of the Soviet Union, to be produced by Academy Award winner James Schamus (Brokeback Mountain) and Joe Pirro (Driveways). Fluk is repped by Amotz Zakai, Amy Schiffman, and Kegan Schell at Echo Lake Entertainment. He is also created the recently-announced HBO series Empty Mansions for Fremantle with director Joe Wright (Atonement, Darkest Hour) attached to direct the pilot. "From the moment I heard Vera's story, about how as a high school teenager she organized one of the greatest concerts in history, I knew her story had to be told," said Fluk. "We were immediately exhilarated by Vera Brandes' remarkable female empowerment story. Her strength, courage and sheer belief in herself and the music of Keith Jarrett will entertain and inspire audiences around the world," added Kelliher.

Don DeLillo’s debut novel, “Americana,” is set to be adapted 51 years after it was first published.

“White Noise” producer Uri Singer has bought the rights to the 1971 novel, continuing his streak of adapting a string of DeLillo works that have been deemed “unadaptable.”

“Americana” tells the story of David Bell, an out-of-touch television executive who sets off on a road trip with his female colleague, Sullivan, to make an avant-garde film. The book explores the intricacies of corporate culture and examines how we create realities, whether they are true or not.

Singer tells Variety: “When you read ‘Americana,’ you understand how Don developed into the literary icon he is today. It’s the story of an ‘American Psycho’-type of protagonist, minus the murder, in the toxic and cut-throat world of television, with all the extraordinary minor characters that mark a DeLillo work. Where ‘American Psycho’ just shows the protagonist as he is,...

Berlin-based One Two Films, in Cannes this week with Ali Abbasi’s competition title “Holy Spider,” is prepping a new feature from writer-director Ido Fluk, the filmmaker behind 2016 Tribeca selection “The Ticket.”

“Köln 75” tells the true story of Vera Brandes, who, in 1975 and at the age of 17, staged the famous Köln Concert by jazz musician Keith Jarrett, which became the top-selling jazz solo album of all time. It stars Mala Emde (“And Tomorrow the Entire World”) in the lead role, alongside John Magaro (“First Cow”) as Jarrett. Magaro is also in Cannes with Kelly Reichardt’s competition title “Showing Up.”

Oscar-winning Polish producer Ewa Puszczynska of Extreme Emotions will co-produce, with Oscar nominee and Emmy winner Oren Moverman serving as executive producer. Moverman also produced Fluk’s previous feature, “The Ticket.”

Other cast attached include Alexander Scheer (“Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush”), Ulrich Tukur (“The Life of Others”), Susanne Wolff...

Exclusive: Acclaimed author Daniel Woodrell’s The Bayou Trilogy crime novels is getting a TV series adaptation. Carl Beverly and Sarah Timberman are developing and producing the project via their Timberman-Beverly Productions banner. It is one of the first high-profile shows under the overall deal the duo signed with Lionsgate Television last year.

The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do chronicles business-as-usual corruption in the fictitious Louisiana parish of St. Bruno. In the eye of the storm stands Detective Renee Shade, whose sense of duty collides with a violent underbelly of Dixie Mafia, ex-cons, dirty cops, and political grifters, along with pesky personal demons and a web of family entanglements.

“Daniel Woodrell is a brilliant storyteller, wordsmith and poet, and his books are a master class in character, crime fiction and the South,” said Beverly. “He plunges readers into the murky depths of his characters’ lives,...

Exclusive: Ted Melfi, whose new film The Starling premiered last night at the Toronto Film Festival, has been set to adapt, direct and produce for Netflix Underworld, based on the seminal novel by Don DeLillo. The novel is a sprawling tapestry spread across decades that has a through line of the home run Bobby Thomson hit in 1951 to win the pennant for the New York Giants, breaking the hearts of crosstown fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

As the home run is hit and retrieved by a young fan named Cotter Martin, things are happening all around, including J. Edgar Hoover learning that moment that the Soviet Union had completed its first test of the hydrogen bomb. The ball eventually winds up in the hands of a waste management business owner named Nick Shay, who sets out to find the original owner as he sorts out his own mess of a life.

Exclusive: Don DeLillo’s novel Libra, a speculative account of the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy interwoven with the life story of his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, is being adapted for television.

Deadline understands that Spectrum Originals is developing a limited series adaptation of the book with American Spy author Lauren Wilkinson, Wolf Hall producer Playground and Paul Giamatti’s Touchy Feely Films, the company behind AMC’s Lodge 49.

It is the latest high-profile book in development at the Charter Communications-backed pay-tv operator after Deadline revealed last year that it was working on an adaptation of William J Mann’s 2014 book Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, And Madness At The Dawn of Hollywood.

Libra, which was first published in 1988, blends fact and fiction to tell the story of the JFK assassination, one of the most mythologized events in American history, and explores the U.S.’s obsession with and relationship to conspiracy.

Johnny Depp has come on board to star as war photographer W. Eugene Smith in the independent drama “Minamata.”

The film will center on Smith’s work as a photographer for Life magazine in exposing the poisoning of the people of Minamata, Japan. Andrew Levitas will direct the film, which is based on the book by Aileen Mioko Smith and W. Eugene Smith and adapted by David K. Kessler.

The story will start with Smith as a recluse, with the glory days of World War II far behind him. But an old friend and a commission from Life Magazine editor Ralph Graves convince him to journey back to Japan to expose a big story: the devastating annihilation of a coastal community through mercury poisoning. “Minamata” will start principal production in Japan followed by Serbia in January.

HanWay Films will handle international sales and distribution and will commence sales at the American Film Market,...

Los Angeles-based film and TV production company Reel World Management has acquired the rights to author Kimberla Lawson Roby’s 14-novel series “The Reverend Curtis Black.” The popular series tells the story of a prominent and very married pastor who is consumed by money, power, and women.

Reel World Management has acquired the rights to the novels with an eye toward developing a television series, with Roby set to serve as executive producer. Roby has authored 27 novels — 12 standalone novels, the 14 published “Reverend Curtis Black” books, and a new “Reverend Curtis Black” novel set to be published at the end of July.

Amy Schiffman of Intellectual Property Group negotiated the “Reverend Curtis Black” deal.

Reel World Management also recently acquired the 20-book series “Virgin River” by Robyn Carr and Emily March’s 15-book “Eternity Springs” series. “These talented storytellers have each created compelling characters and worlds which have attracted a global fanbase,...