Cross Creek, JKIN Films Set Cody Brotter To Dig Into Tale Of College Pals Who Tunneled Under Berlin Wall And Freed 29 At Height Of Cold War

EXCLUSIVE: Tyler Thompson’s Cross Creek Pictures has teamed with Jay Kinra’s JKIN Films to produce Dig. Black List scribe Cody Brotter has been set to write a geopolitical thriller inspired by the true events of Tunnel 29, the famous escape route built under the Berlin Wall during the height of the Cold War.

The film will offer a rare first-hand account of what really happened during the construction of the tunnel, which was built in 1962 by a culturally diverse group of International college students from Italy, Germany & India. They met while attending The University of West Berlin and living in the same college dorm. The students were secretly aided by NBC News, which provided funding in exchange for exclusive access to capture footage of the escape. There were twists and turns that went into freeing 29 people who risked their lives to venture through the leaky tunnel to get under the wall, and the operation was nearly compromised by a Stasi spy The footage was then compiled into the NBC documentary The Tunnel, but even that was controversial: the Kennedy Administration State Department, already dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis, initially squashed the docu. But it ultimately aired on the network and won three Emmy Awards in 1963.

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Cross Creek, which most recently released the Christian Bale-Scott Cooper film The Pale Blue Eye on Netflix, is currently in production on the animated musical Melody, directed by Jeremy Zag and starring Katy Perry. Cross Creek’s no stranger to non-fiction adaptations, nabbing six Academy Award nominations for Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago Seven and winning two for Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge.

Brotter wrote Drudge, the narrative script about the digital news hound Matt Drudge that is being developed by Cross Creek. After the script landed near the top of the Black List, he became a sought after scribe in the true story space. He most recently finished adapting Guy Lawson’s Rolling Stone article Oxy-Gen for MGM and Pete Davidson, which Deadline revealed late last year.

Kinra’s dad, Dr. Mohan Kinra, was a survivor and participant in the Tunnel 29 dig. He partnered with Tyler Thompson of Cross Creek and Cody to develop the unlikely history into a feature film.

Casey Tebo is exec producer.

Cross Creek is repped by CAA; Brotter by CAA, Manage-ment, and Ziffren Brittenham; and Kinra is repped by Purvi Lavingia of Lavin Entertainment.

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