CBS Films has attached Easy A and Friends with Benefits director Will Gluck to a big screen adaptation of Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper, Deadline reports. The novel, released last year, is written by Geoffrey Gray and is officially described as follows:
“I have a bomb here and I would like you to sit by me.
That was the note handed to a stewardess by a mild-mannered passenger on a Northwest Orient flight in 1971. It was the start of one of the most astonishing whodunits in the history of American true crime: how one man extorted $200,000 from an airline, then parachuted into the wilds of the Pacific Northwest and into oblivion. D.B. Coopers case has become the stuff of legend as well as an obsession for his pursuers, cursing them with everything from bankruptcy to suicidal despair. Now with “Skyjack”, journalist Geoffrey Gray delves into this unsolved mystery, uncovering new leads in the famous case.
Starting with a tip from a private investigator on a promising suspect (a Cooper lookalike, Northwest employee, and trained paratrooper), Gray is propelled into the murky depths of a decades-old mystery, conducting new interviews and obtaining a first-ever look at Coopers FBI file. Beginning with a heartstopping and unprecedented re-creation of the crime itself, from cabin to cockpit to tower, “Skyjack” offers uncanny portraits of characters who have either chased Cooper or might have committed the crime. The clues to unmasking the unknown hijacker are buried in the wallet of a retired insurance salesman, the prison record of a Green Beret on trial for murder, the deathbed confession of an older brother, the medical records of a transgendered woman, and the memories of countless other astonishing suspects.
“In Treatment” writer Keith Bunin will adapt the screenplay with Gluck himself producing.
You can check out a trailer for the book itself in the player below:
