Brad Pitt enjoyed plenty of success shepherding and starring in Moneyball, so you can see why he might be looking to repeat the trick with another based-on-truth tale, albeit a slightly more controversial one. He’s currently shopping an adaptation of Edwin Black’s bestselling book IBM And The Holocaust.
The tome chronicles the true tale of how IBM’s 1933 chief executive Thomas Watson entered into a strategic alliance with Nazi Germany, which resulted in a punch card method of sorting through the data mined from years of German census results.
What the regime learned, it put to horrific use, identifying, taxing, ghettoizing and ultimately exterminating millions of Jews.
Black’s book hit shelves in 2001, but Pitt has held the rights for the last couple of years. He and his production company, Plan B, initially approached HBO with an idea for a TV movie with a script by All Good Things’ Marcus Hinchey, but that's as far as that approach got.
Now it appears that Pitt and his team are taking it out to other cable networks and movie studios, with the actor loosely attached to star in the hopes that it might attract directors. Nothing concrete has been set up yet, so this one will be floating in the development ether for a while.