Boston University narrative studies professor Mitchell Zuckoff’s 2011 bestseller, Lost In Shangri-La: The Epic True Story of a Plane Crash Into the Stone Age, may soon fly onto movie screens.
Sony Pictures-based production company 3000 Pictures has bought the film rights to the Kirkus-starred survival story, according to Deadline. Zuckoff and producer Richard Abate will co-write the screenplay.
Zuckoff’s work, which was named as one of Kirkus’ best nonfiction books of 2011, tells the tale of the 1945 crash of an American plane carrying 24 military men and women, in what is now known as Papua, in Western New Guinea. Only three people survived, including Margaret Hastings, a member of the Women’s Air Corps. Kirkus’ reviewer noted Zuckoff’s “successful re-creation of the grueling month-long experiences of the survivors—badly burned, with gangrenous wounds, often despairing that search planes wouldn’t find them under the dense jungle canopy”; they also encountered local farmer-warriors. The review pointed out that a description of a “dangerous rescue by glider planes has all the makings of a breathtaking movie scene” and that the book as a whole is “ready for the big screen.”It would appear that producer Elizabeth Gabler, head of 3000 Pictures, agrees on that score.
Zuckoff’s nonfiction book 13 Hours, about the 2012 terrorist attack on an American military compound in Benghazi, Libya, was made into an Oscar-nominated 2016 film, directed by Transformers’ Michael Bay; Abate was an executive producer. Zuckoff was also once part of the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” investigative reporting team, which many moviegoers may know from the 2015 film Spotlight (although he wasn’t portrayed in that movie). His book Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11 received a starred Kirkus review earlier this year and made the year-end Best Nonfiction of 2019 list.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
