HBO has acquired U.S. rights to Leah Wolchok’s documentary Very Semi-Serious: A Partially Thorough Portrait Of New Yorker Cartoonists, with the pic premiering on the network December 7 following an Oscar-qualifying theatrical run starting November 20 in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The pic, which had its…

EXCLUSIVE: A nearly 80-year-old article in The New Yorker about the first documented haunted house has scared up a deal at Fox Searchlight. Searchlight will develop a movie from Voices Through The Trumpet, a two-part article written by Carl Carmer. JT Petty has been set to write, and Alison Greenspan is producing with…

UPDATED, 5:57 PM: In round three of his coverage of l’affair Abramson, New Yorker media reporter Ken Auletta pulled back from his claim that the first female executive editor of the New York Times was ousted by publisher and chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. after raising issues about getting lower compensation than her…

Senior contributing writer Jodi Enda’s  in-depth examination of strategies newsrooms use to try to stay solvent won the prestigious prize today at Syracuse University’s Mirror Awards luncheon — an annual affair that attracts New York’s media elite. The event paid off for the school this year: The family of Dick Clark…

The author of an in-depth exploration into the events that led to the 2003 toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad won the first John M. Higgins award for enterprise reporting at today’s Mirror Awards reception in New York. Peter Maass, who wrote the piece for The New Yorker with support from Pro Publica…

EXCLUSIVE: Focus Features is making a rights deal for David Grann’s massive article in the May 28 issue of The New Yorker, The Yankee Commandante, with George Clooney attached to direct. He will produce with his Smokehouse partner Grant Heslov. The article is about William Alexander Morgan, an American who helped…

Embargoes are dumbass, and even more so when they involve matters of no consequence like showbiz. And still more so when the movie review at issue was positive like David Denby’s critique of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in The New Yorker. In my opinion, no film reviewer should ever agree to embargoes because doing…

EXCLUSIVE: Paramount and Indian Paintbrush won a heated auction for screen rights on A Murder Foretold, a lengthy article in the April 4 issue of The New Yorker by David Grann about a series of high-level murders in Guatemala. It takes place in a country devastated by killings routinely perpetrated by everyone from…

EXCLUSIVE: The Hurt Locker screenwriter Mark Boal and Management 360 have partnered with financier/producer Megan Ellison to option The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, an article about WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in The New York Times Magazine written by the newspaper’s executive editor Bill Keller. Ellison, an exec…