Spec Script Deal: “The Last Days of Night”

Black Bear Pictures acquires historical drama spec script “The Last Days of Night” written by Academy Award winner and Black List screenwriter Graham Moore. From Deadline:

Teddy Schwarzman’s Black Bear Pictures has won an auction that puts him back together with Graham Moore and Morten Tyldum, with whom he made the Best Picture-nominated hit The Imitation Game. Schwarzman has acquired a package for The Last Days Of Night, which Moore (who won an Oscar for adapting The Imitation Game) has adapted in a spec script from the novel he wrote which Random House will published September 20.

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Like The Imitation Game, this one involves seminal technological geniuses. The publisher describes it as being “about the nature of genius, the cost of ambition, and the battle to electrify America. New York, 1888. The miracle of electric light is in its infancy. Thomas Edison has won the race to the patent office and is suing his only remaining rival, George Westinghouse, for the unheard of sum of one billion dollars. To defend himself, Westinghouse makes a surprising choice in his attorney: He hires an untested twenty-six-year-old fresh out of Columbia Law School named Paul Cravath. The task facing Cravath is beyond daunting. Edison proves to be a formidable, wily, and dangerous opponent. Yet this young, unknown attorney shares with his famous opponent a compulsion to win at all costs. How will he do it? As he takes greater and greater risks, he’ll find that everyone in his path is playing their own game, and no one is quite who they seem.” Woven into the tale are Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, Stanford White and other technological titans of the late 19th century.

This sets up a race of sorts with The Weinstein Company’s project The Current War also about the competition between Edison and Westinghouse.

Moore is repped by CAA and Think Tank Management.

By my count, this is the 26th spec script deal of 2016.

There were 28 spec script deals year-to-date in 2015.