The rise and fall of Rebekah Brooks is to get the film treatment, reports said from Cannes on Saturday, just days after the former Rupert Murdoch aide was charged in Britain’s phone-hacking scandal.
The story of the former chief executive of Murdoch’s British newspaper wing News International is in development as a feature film, the Hollywood Reporter wrote from the Riviera festival, quoting the project’s producers.
“She’s a great story,” the US producer Gene Kirkwood told the trade magazine. “Her rise is almost like Great Expectations – with a moral.”
“We will make a film and also use it as a porthole into Murdoch’s world,” he was quoted as saying. “I see it as a ‘Citizen Kane approach’,” told “with empathy.” Kirkwood’s production firm has optioned the rights to an article about Brooks, written by Suzanna Andrews for Vanity Fair, as the basis for the film.
The movie is being developed by BiteSize Entertainment, a multiplatform entertainment studio unveiled in Cannes by Kirkwood and Ron Bloom, chief executive of online video site Mevio.
Kirkwood told the Hollywood Reporter the project was still in its early stages, with no writer, director or actors attached, and no budget set. Asked who he would see playing Brooks, he said: “Right now, I would do it with all unknowns, all English actors.” Bloom told the paper the story of the controversial Brooks is “a story everyone is afraid to tell.”
The 43-year-old resigned as head of News International shortly after the News of the World was shut down amid public revulsion that it had hacked the phone of a murdered schoolgirl.
She was arrested in July over allegations of phone-hacking and bribing public officials, and she remains on bail for those accusations. This week she was also charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in relation to the scandal.
