Lionsgate Buys Two For Elizabeth Banks’ Brownstone Banner; Erica Oyama Adapting ‘White Girl Problems’
EXCLUSIVE: Lionsgate is closing two deals for book adaptations that will be produced by Pitch Perfect producers Elizabeth Banks and Max Handelman through their Brownstone Productions banner. They’ve just closed a deal to acquire a pitch for hot scribe Erica Oyama to write a comedy based on Babe Walker’s bestseller White Girl Problems, a comic pseudo-memoir by a pampered gal out to show that even rich people deserve sympathy too. For example: She hates her horse and all the wealthy men she dates, and she has a shopping addiction that caused her once to spend $246,000 at Barneys in an afternoon. Authors Tanner Cohen, David Oliver Cohen and Lara Schoenhals wrote the book under the alias Babe Walker.
Lionsgate is separately acquiring for Brownstone Heist Society, the Ally Carter bestseller about a woman who has been part of a larcenous family and tries to go straight. That ends when her father is suspected of stealing a mobster’s art collection and she and a friend have two weeks to steal back the artwork and get it back to the mobster. For Banks, both of these are producing projects only at this point, and she will produce with Handelman.
White Girl Problems‘ scripter Oyama usually writes with her actor-writer husband Ken Marino, and they recently made deals to adapt Go The F To Sleep at Fox 2000 and True Freshman for Fox. Her scripting work includes the TV series Burning Love and Childrens Hospital.
These deals extend Lionsgate’s relationship with Banks, who stars in The Hunger Games series, as well as Lionsgate’s What To Expect When You’re Expecting and Summit’s Man On A Ledge. After producing the sleeper hit Pitch Perfect for Universal, they are developing a sequel, and Brownstone is separately producing Tink for Disney, with Banks playing Tinkerbell in the live-action film.
Paradigm and Principato Young rep Oyama; UTA and Untitled rep Banks and Brownstone and that agency brokered the deal for White Girl Problems with the Waxman-Leavell Agency, and Heist Society with Nelson Literary Agency.
Related: Legendary And Lionsgate To Meet This Week; Details On What Tull Wants
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