Deadline‘s Michael Fleming is reporting that Sony Pictures and producer Scott Rudin have nabbed remake rights to Katie Dellamaggiore‘s Brooklyn Castle, an inner-city social uplift doc (i.e., Undefeated meets chess excellence and budget cuts) that premiered yesterday at South by Southwest. The idea is to remake it as a feature with doses of grit, hardship and inspirational feel-good.
This will be Rudin’s second chess-themed film, the first being 1993’s Waiting for Bobby Fischer, which Steve Zallian wrote and directed.
The remake deal was orchestrated by Cinetic Media’s John Sloss.
Dellamaggiore’s doc is about I.S. 318, an inner-city school “where more than 65 percent of students are from homes with incomes below the federal poverty level.” (It’s located at 101 Walton Street, which is just a bit south of the Lorimer stop on the L line — not exactly a bombed-out area.) The twist is that I.S. 138 “has the winning-est junior high school chess team in the country.” And yet public school budget cuts have put the chess program and its accomplishments in jeopardy.
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