Kelly Fremon Craig has booked her follow-up to “The Edge of Seventeen.” The Hollywood Reporter confirms that the writer-director is taking the reins on a feature adaptation of “Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me,” a soon-to-be-published memoir by writer and literary editor Adrienne Brodeur. The buzzy book — which Brodeur received a seven-figure advance from Houghton Mifflin for — attracted several studios, with Chenin Entertainment ultimately securing the rights.
Like Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” “Wild Game” centers a complicated relationship between a mother and daughter, but the latter is decidedly darker. Brodeur’s mother, Malabar, “embroiled her daughter in her extramarital love affair at a young age, taking over her life and self, until the author gradually grasped the reins on her own story and identity,” THR writes.
Chernin Entertainment is producing and 20th Century Fox holds the rights to finance and distribute the project.
Brodeur serves as executive director of literary non-profit Aspen Words. Alongside Francis Ford Coppola, she founded fiction mag “Zoetrope: All-Story,” a two-time National Magazine Award winner for fiction. Her novel “Man Camp” was published by Random House in 2005.
When Broudeur brought her proposal for “Wild Game” to publishers she was surprised by their response. “So many people were telling me their own mother-daughter stories,” she said. “There is some kind of connection going on.” She thought she was writing a “very singular and specific story,” and was consequently shocked that it received so much interest.
Fremon Craig earned a DGA nod for outstanding directorial achievement for a first-time feature film for 2016’s “Edge of Seventeen.” The critically acclaimed Hailee Steinfeld-starrer centers on a teen outcast who is traumatized when her best friend begins dating her popular older brother.
