Amazon Wins ‘Unfit’ Auction; Dakota Johnson Circling RatPac Drama

EXCLUSIVE: Amazon Studios just won a multi-studio bidding battle and has paid mid-six figures for Unfit, a spec script by Melissa London Hilfers that RatPac will produce, with Fifty Shades of Grey‘s Dakota Johnson circling. Her deal isn’t closed. Brett Ratner and John Cheng are producing.

Here is the logline of the fact-based story: In the not-so-distant past, America was gripped by a political movement that promised to eliminate the “unfit” from our country. This is the shocking true story of Carrie Buck, a young Virginia woman who became a lightning rod for that movement and was forced to singlehandedly fight against it for the one thing she desperately wanted – to be a mother.

Hilfers, a former litigation lawyer, has been busy since turning to screenwriting. She sold the spec Undone to Black Bear and Parkes/MacDonald last year, and she currently is rewriting an untitled Emily Dickinson project for Ellen Kuras to direct for M.Y.R.A. Entertainment. She is repped by Paradigm, managed by Alan Gasmer and lawyered by Allison Binder. Johnson is WME.