IP Picks🔎: Two Twists on ‘Succession’ & Megachurch Secrets Revealed➕ High school debaters — and Ted Turner deserves a biopic
Welcome to The Optionist. Lots of interesting things caught my attention this week — but let’s start with the death of Ted Turner. What an endlessly fascinating life he led. Early on in the Optionist, I spoke with Porter Bibb, a friend of Turner’s who wrote a biography of the CNN founder, about how to make a biopic about him. “I call him the first honest billionaire because he gave a billion dollars to the United Nations to initially pay the dues the U.S. owed and hadn’t paid for more than a decade,” Porter told me. “He really created the Giving Pledge that Gates and Buffet have taken up. He is the largest landowner in the United States — well, second now to John Malone — and he's deeded all of it to the Nature Conservancy. He’s the greatest ocean racing sailor in history. You’ve got CNN, and he also created the first satellite television station. One of the most extraordinary things he did, which almost nobody remembers, is that after the U.S. pulled out of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, he created his own Olympics in Moscow — the Goodwill Games — which was a huge financial and sporting success.” There was more, too, including buying the Atlanta Braves and later finding $12 million in the club’s home-field concession stands. We’re still waiting for the Turner movie, which is a shame because there’s more than one part of his life ripe for adaptation. Elsewhere:
This week: A Time Travel and an Agatha Christie spin on Succession, A pastor’s wife gets real and high school debatersTime travel is a perennial genre, but I definitely think I’ve noticed an uptick in books featuring it of late — including a couple that were quietly optioned way ahead of publication. A lot of these are less sci-fi stories than ones that use time travel as a hook to tell a richly dramatic story, as in this one that also owes a debt to Succession. I know all of us have heard so, so many “Succession meets X” pitches, but this one that combines that with an Agatha Christie-style mystery really hits the mark. 🔒The full lineup for paid subscribers:⏳ A Succession meets time-travel story with limited series potential, about a woman who travels back in time to make her family’s fortune in the future. 🏔 A classic Agatha Christie-style country house murder mystery centered on a Succession-like family. 🙏 A Greenleaf-meets-Empire screen-ready drama about what goes on behind the scenes in a megachurch 🗣️ A story with both movie and series potential about high school debaters. 🤼♂️ A One Day meets Pachinko sweeping romantic drama perfect for a limited series centered on a college student in a star-crossed romance and her mother’s secret revolutionary past. This column is for paid subscribers only. Interested in a group sub for your team or company? Click here. To access all The Optionist content and continue reading, paid subscribers can click here.
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