William Monahan (The Departed) will write a fact-based thriller for Paramount based on an article that will appear in Playboy later this year, says Variety.
It’s the story of a drug dealer who traded a prison sentence to go undercover at a maximum security hospital for the criminally insane, where he tried to get a serial killer to divulge the whereabouts of his victims.
Graham King will produce with Alexandra Milchan, and the Paramount project kicks off a first-look deal that King’s GK Films has made with Monahan, who will take an office in King’s new Santa Monica headquarters. Joel Gotler will be executive producer.
King was introduced to the project by Milchan, who had received a one-page proposal for the article by Jim Keene and writer Hillel Levin.
The son of a police chief, Keene fell from grace after he was caught dealing drugs. As an alternative to a 10 years-to-life sentence, he was allowed to cozy up to a man authorities believed murdered 25 young women. Only the prison psychiatrist knew Keene was undercover, plus a visiting “girlfriend” who was actually an FBI agent.
