The film rights to Sara Gruen's enormously successful novel Water for Elephents (Algonquin Books, 2006) were recently sold to the movie studio Fox 2000 in a competitive bidding war that included Paramount, Universal, and Warner Bros.
Richard LaGravenese, who wrote the book-to-film screenplays for P.S. I Love You and Freedom Writers, is set to write the adapation of the novel, which spent twelve weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Francis Lawrence, whose last project was I Am Legend (2007), based on a 1954 science fiction novel by Richard Matheson and starring Will Smith, will direct.
Water for Elephents, which has sold over two million copies in paperback, is the story of Jacob Jankowski, a man in his nineties who took care of animals at a circus during the Depression. Gruen's next novel, her fourth, is titled Ape House and is forthcoming from Spiegel & Grau next May.
