Disney has acquired screen rights to a new rendition of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” to be written and helmed by David Mamet, reports Variety. Mamet will also produce with Andrew Braunsberg.
The trade says that the film will be an amalgamation of the famed diary; the stage adaptation by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich; and Mamet’s own original take on the material that could reframe the story as a young girl’s right of passage. Frank, who died at 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, became an icon of the Holocaust after the post-war publication of the diary that she kept during the two years that her family hid in a secret attic apartment in Amsterdam.
A 1959 big screen rendition of Hackett and Goodrich’s “Diary of Anne Frank” earned an Oscar for Shelley Winters. The Anne Frank story has been told several times on TV, most recently ABC’s 2001 Emmy-winning mini “Anne Frank: The Whole Story.”
