By Acclaimed Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay has signed on to co-write and direct an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1999 novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.
Ramsay’s last feature was 2017’s You Were Never Really Here, the brooding and cerebral crime drama starring Joaquin Phoenix, who won the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival that year. Ramsay took home the Best Screenplay Award for her script.
In King’s original novel, Trisha McFarland is a nine-year-old girl who becomes separated from the group during a family hike in the woods, left to survive on a meager supply of haphazard food rations and tools, including her Walkman (ah, the ’90s!). Listening to baseball games featuring her celebrity idol, Boston Red Sox pitcher Tom Gordon, Trisha begins to hallucinate conversations with Gordon and grow weary from starvation, and it becomes unclear whether the perils of the forest are imagined or otherworldly…
The film adaptation of Tom Gordon has been floating around for some time now, with current producer Christine Romero’s late husband, the legendary George Romero, originally involved with the project. Christy Hall, writer on Netflix’s I Am Not Okay With This, co-wrote the script with Ramsay, with Village Roadshow acting as the production house.
The sheer volume of King’s material and adaptations thereof can conjure a mixed bag of ups and downs, but in a world where Stephen King adaptations can yield the likes of The Shining and The Dead Zone, here’s hoping Ramsay’s film joins the upper echelon of the horror icon’s expanded catalogue.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter