Stone Village Pictures and producer Scott Steindorff are bringing Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita” to the big screen, says The Hollywood Reporter.
The Los Angeles-based production company has optioned the late Russian writer’s once-banned book, an inspiration for Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.”
“Master and Margarita” begins in pre-WWII Moscow, where the devil appears as a mysterious man who insinuates himself into a literary crowd. Amid a series of deaths and disappearances, the devil brings together the title characters, a despairing novelist and his devoted but married lover. The story shifts to the setting of the master’s rejected novel, Jerusalem in the time of Pontius Pilate, and then to a supernatural world where Satanic forces have taken over Margarita’s life.
Roman Polanski adapted the novel in the late 1980s and was set to direct before Warner Bros. reportedly pulled the plug because of budgetary concerns. The book was adapted into a Russian TV miniseries in 2005.
