EXCLUSIVE
NEW YORK — Touchstone Pictures has paid mid-six figures for a pitch by Patricia K. Meyer about a famed sports bookie coerced into testifying against the mobsters he did business with.
The film will be produced by Martin Scorsese and Harry Ufland, who previously set up another fact-based Meyer-scripted film, “Big Bucks,” at Touchstone.
Meyer was brought the project by Triton Entertainment and took it to Scorsese and Ufland. The purchase was made by Touchstone’s Donald DeLine and Jordi Ros, with CAA’s Byrdie Lifson repping Meyer.
On “Big Bucks,” Touchstone has landed a director and now will try to tempt the father-daughter tandem of Paul and Mira Sorvino to star. J.K. Amalou, coming off the Fox Searchlight film “Hard Men,” will direct the true story of a family that operated an armored trucking business and wound up embezzling millions of dollars from it.
It’s the third project that Scorsese and Ufland have set up together. They also joined forces at Universal for “Live,” a Richard Pryor biopic scripted by Rob O’Hara, based on the book “Pryor Convictions,” to which Damon Wayans is attached to play the famed comic.
