U.K. production company What’s It All About? has acquired film and TV rights to Good Times, Bad Times, Harold Evans’s memoir of editing The Times of London under Rupert Murdoch, Variety reports. Mr. Evans (Tina Brown’s husband) resigned from The Times shortly after Mr. Murdoch took over in 1981, over a lack of editorial independence.
The film will also reference the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World—as Mr. Evans’s updated memoir did in its new introduction. The screenplay is not yet written, so your guess is as good as ours as to how they’ll skip through time elegantly. (The confused-seeming Mr. Murdoch of last summer’s Parliamentary Hearings reminiscing about the ’80s, perhaps?) What’s It All About? creative director Leon Lecash hopes to begin filming by the end of the year and is scouting writers and potential production partners.
We can probably rule out Fox Searchlight, eh?
These are the parts we’re casting: Harold Evans, Rupert Murdoch, and Margaret Thatcher—whose archives recently revealed that secret meeting between she and Mr. Murdoch where she was informed he was going to try and take over The Times did happen, despite Mr. Murdoch’s denials.
