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Contact: Rick Miramontez
rick@oandmco.com /212-695-7400

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, PLEASE

New York, NY (4/27/2011) – Christopher Weekes, whose Jim Henson biopic spec screenplay Muppet Man topped 2009’s Black List, has been tapped by producers Jean Doumanian (August: Osage County, All The Real Girls) and Michael Shulman and Craig Saavedra, (principals of Starry Night Entertainment – Sherman's Way, White People) to adapt Mitchell Zuckoff's acclaimed biography Ponzi's Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend for the big screen.

Two-time Academy Award winner Milos Forman (Amadeus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) is in talks to direct.

Ponzi's Scheme is an account of the incredible rise and fall of Charles Ponzi. Long before Enron and Madoff became household names synonymous with fiscal irresponsibility Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant who moved to American in the 1920’s in search of the American Dream shook Boston to its core with an earnest business venture that quickly morphed into the world’s most famous scam, which today still bears his name: The Ponzi Scheme.

“The story of Italian immigrant Charles Ponzi is a thrilling saga of the scam that gripped America in the twenties, and the man whose name thereby became legendary,” said Jean Doumanian. “Ponzi was a lovable con man whose story of misguided ambition resonates today.”

“We feel confident that Christopher’s imaginative approach to biographies, coupled with Milos’s unparalleled ability to create moving portraits of seemingly unsympathetic characters, will result in an epic cautionary tale about one man’s search for the American Dream,” said Craig Saavedra and Michael Shulman.

Weekes is repped by Britton Rizzio at Circle of Confusion and David Karp and Adriana Alberghetti at WME.

Forman is repped by Chris Donnelly at WME and Dennis Aspland at Aspland Management.

Biographies

Jean Doumanian (Producer). Based in New York City, Jean Doumanian Productions produces works for film, theatre and television. Jean Doumanian is currently a producer on the Broadway production of Robert Lopez, Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Book of Mormon, The Motherf***ker with the Hat by Stephen Aldy Guirgis, The House of Blue Leaves by John Guare and the upcoming Olivier winning play, The Mountaintop by Katori Hall. Film projects include the feature film adaptation of its Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning production of Tracy Letts' August: Osage County with the Weinstein company, as well as adaptations of the Olivier winning play Blackbird by David Harrower and Galveston, the debut novel by Nic Pizzolatto to be directed by acclaimed film and theatre director, John Crowley.

The company’s other Broadway credits include Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, Michael Frayn’s Democracy, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune and Amour. Off-Broadway highlights include Craig Wright’s Mistakes Were Made, the recent landmark production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, The Great American Trailer Park Musical, Fuddy Meers, Bat Boy the Musical, Things You Shouldn't Say Past Midnight, Dinah Was, and Death Defying Acts.

Under the leadership of Ms. Doumanian, the company has produced films by David Mamet (The Spanish Prisoner), David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls), Woody Allen (Bullets Over Broadway, Everyone Says I Love You, Mighty Aphrodite, Deconstructing Harry, Sweet and Lowdown, Celebrity, and Small Time Crooks), Barbara Kopple (Wild Man Blues), and Jason Alexander (Just Looking). The company’s productions have been nominated for multiple Academy Awards and Golden Globes, including Sven Nykvist’s The Ox, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign language film.

Craig Saavedra and Michael Shulman (Producers) head the New York City based film, TV and theatre production and development company Starry Night Entertainment, which focuses on bridging the worlds of stage and screen. Recently, Starry Night produced the feature film Sherman’s Way, the Off-Broadway play White People by J.T. Rogers at Atlantic Stage 2 and were associate producers on Craig Wright’s Off-Broadway production of Mistakes Were Made at the Barrow Street Theatre.

Starry Night is currently developing a Broadway musical inspired by the catalog of a legendary pop icon as well as shooting a new reality TV series set in the world of Broadway.

PRAISE FOR PONZI'S SCHEME BY MITCHELL ZUCKOFF

“Ponzi is a great American character, and Mr. Zuckoff does him full justice … A snappy, diligently researched account of Ponzi's rise and rapid fall.”
– William Grimes, The New York Times

“Mitchell Zuckoff's biography of this charming rogue … provokes our wonder precisely because his subject is so brazen – and yet so naively captive to his own illusions.”
– Roger Lowenstein, The Wall Street Journal

“This beautifully researched book is a rollicking tale of a man with irresistible charm and moxie who based his life on the principle, ‘We are all gamblers.’
– The Washington Times

“[Zuckoff] recounts Ponzi’s wild cat-and-mouse game with banking and legal authorities with verve and authority.”
– The Chicago Tribune

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