“Gilmore Girls” star and author Lauren Graham is writing a screenplay. As Deadline reports, Graham has optioned Jennifer E. Smith’s YA novel “Windfall” and plans to pen its film adaptation for her production company, Good Game Productions. No word on a director yet.
Released in May, “Windfall” is the story of Alice, who buys her best friend and longtime crush, Teddy, a lottery ticket for his 18th birthday. “To their surprise, he ends up winning $140M, which changes everything,” Deadline summarizes. Two of Smith’s previous novels, “The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight” and “Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between,” are also receiving big screen adaptations.
“Windfall” isn’t the only screenplay Graham has in the works. She is developing “Wedding for One,” which she wrote with “Jane the Virgin” showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman, for Lakeshore Entertainment. She previously adapted Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan’s novel “The Royal We” for CBS Films and is producing the project. Graham also adapted her own novel, “Someday, Someday Maybe,” for The CW in 2014. The bestseller about a young actress trying to make it in New York was published in 2013.
Graham recently reprised her most-famous role, Lorelai Gilmore, in Netflix’s “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.” The four mini-movies picked up about a decade after the original WB series left off and followed Lorelai, her daughter (Alexis Bledel), and her mother (Kelly Bishop), throughout one calendar year. Graham previously portrayed Lorelai, a young single mother building a business from the ground up, from 2000–2006 on “Gilmore Girls.”
The “Parenthood” actress recently starred in the Fox pilot “Linda from HR,” but the project is not moving forward. You can catch Graham next as a recurring guest star on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Not much is known about Graham’s character on the long-running comedy, but she told TVLine she portrays “someone who has very colorful language.”