Danny Boyle has snapped up the rights to Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Suketu Mehta's non-fiction hymn to Mumbai that proved an invaluable reference-book for the Slumdog Millionaire team. Simon Beaufoy told the Daily Telegraph that he's currently banging a script into shape.
The book is part travelogue, part autobiography and part history, described in the Telegraph's own review as "the spirit of Bombay speaking". Beaufoy claims that Mehta is supportive of the creative licence needed to carve a narrative from the text: "There are some great characters in the book, but no stories, so my job will be to get the fictional out of a non-fictional story."
The book actually features several stories, taking in gangsters, cops, right-wing Hindus, Bollywood and strippers, so it's possible a portmanteau approach could work, or even a sprawling multi-character narrative a la Magnolia or Robert Altman's Short Cuts.
Beaufoy's Slumdog script won every award it was nominated for, including the BAFTA and the Oscar. He's also attached to a Dreamworks animated adaptation of Terry Pratchett's gnomes-on-the-run children's novel Truckers.