Abrams Wants "Great World"

According to The Hollywood Reporter, JJ Abrams is attempting to secure the rights to "Let the Great World Spin" for his production company Bad Robot. Great World is National Book Award winning novel by Colum McCann about Philippe Petit and his tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers in August 1974.

The book's characters include a young Irish monk living among prostitutes in the Bronx; a group of mothers mourning their sons, killed in Vietnam, in a Park Avenue apartment; and a 38-year-old grandmother walking the streets with her teenage daughter. With comparisons to Don DeLillo's work, McCann's novel serves as an allegory of 9/11 and its aftermath.

"Spin" joins a handful of other projects Abrams has in the works as a producer that spring from literary source material and do not feed his typical genre obsessions. Also at Bad Robot and Paramount are an untitled diamond-heist project derived from a Joshua Davis article in Wired and "Mystery on Fifth Avenue," from a New York Times article about a family's Manhattan apartment that was designed as a giant puzzle.