Chiara Atik is turning her gaze from the stage to the screen. MGM has acquired the playwright’s first spec script, “Fairy Godmother,” following a “competitive” bidding process, Deadline reports.
The spec is “a comic revisionist look at the classic Fairy Godmother tale,” according to Deadline. Helen Estabrook (“Whiplash”) has signed on to produce.
Atik’s plays include “Women,” a mash-up of Lena Dunham’s “Girls” and Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” and “Five Times in One Night,” comic sketches centered around sex. She’s written for The Atlantic, Elle, and The Hairpin, and authored the 2013 nonfiction book “Modern Dating: A Field Guide.” Deadline writes that Atik, an alumni of Ensemble Studio Theater’s Youngblood writing group, “was also a staff writer on MTV’s talking-head/sketch show, ‘Hey, Girl!’ and Netflix’s upcoming animation series ‘Green Eggs and Ham.’”
In the past, Atik has identified playwriting as her favorite medium to work in, calling it “the dearest to [her] heart.” She explained, “I find theater so continuously exciting every single time the lights go down on something you’ve written, or made to experience with an audience. But that being said, I really, really enjoy writing across all different mediums.” Atik emphasized that “it’s really nice also to have different ways to get your voice out there, and the ability to experiment with different forms. It lets you tell a story and see how people react to different things.”
Given her enthusiasm about tackling a variety of media, it’s unsurprising that Atik is writing “Fairy Godmother” for the big screen.
