Scott Free, Anne Hathaway Align With Brad Ingelsby Spec ‘The Burning Woman’

EXCLUSIVE: Scott Free has come aboard to produce The Burning Woman, a package that has Anne Hathaway circling to star in a spec script by Brad Ingelsby, whose latest script Run All Night, was turned into the Jaume Collet-Serra directed action film that stars Liam Neeson and Ed Harris. Ridley Scott, Michael Schaefer and Michael Pruss are producing The Burning Woman.

In a small, blue-collar town in Pennsylvania, a 32-year-old woman’s teen daughter goes missing and she is left to raise her infant grandson alone. The story is told over the course of 11 years, from the time her daughter vanishes, through the the trials-and-tribulations of subsequent years looking for closure, leading up the long-awaited discovery of the truth. It’s a drama with thriller elements.

The drama is based on an original idea from Ingelsby, who developed the script with Pruss, and the scribe wrote it with the Oscar-winning actress in mind. Hathaway read it and became attached, I’m told. This is all happening quickly, and they are looking for a director before they take it out to the town to hook a distributor.

Ingelsby last year sold to Scott Free his spec A Better Place, an elevated gritty thriller in the vein of A Simple Plan, and it continues a long relationship between the writer and Pruss. Ingelsby was a 27-year-old AFI grad living at home with his parents in Pennsylvania and working for his father’s insurance business when his very first script, Low Dweller, sold for $650,000 against $1.1 million to Relativity in 2008, with Scott attached to direct and Leonardo DiCaprio to star. Scott and DiCaprio both dropped out but remained producers, and the project eventually became Out Of The Furnace, the gritty drama that Scott Cooper directed with Christian Bale, Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Zoe Saldana and Willem Dafoe. It was a throwback movie that proved too rough for mainstream audiences, a lot like the Cormac McCarthy-scripted The Counselor, which Fox made and Scott did direct. Pruss helped Ingelsby get his Low Dweller spec seen around town–Brooklyn Weaver was exec producer–and they also collaborated on Hold On To Me which James Marsh is attached to, and The Signal, which is being developed by Paramount. CAA, manager Brooklyn Weaver and attorney Jeff Frankel rep Ingelsby.