Clearly, as everyone at Empire Towers demonstrates, journalists are the coolest people on the planet. That must explain why Brad Pitt has acquired the rights to **The Imperfectionists via his Plan B production company.
Tom Rachman's novel, based on his own experiences as a wire-service reporter in Italy, deals with the trials and tribulations of the staff of an English-language newspaper in Rome. Hacking out editions of an eccentric fifty-year-old enterprise with declining readership and no newfangled concessions to the modern word, like a website, the disparate journos (work-dodger, mid-life crisis, OCD, Basset hound enthusiast etc.) come together in adversity. It was published earlier this year to a generally enthusiastic response: The New York Times called it a cross between Evelyn Waugh's Scoop and Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
There's no suggestion in Deadline's story that Pitt has his eye on any role but producer at this stage (there's not even a writer attached yet), but the novel's large cast of characters gives this the potential to be a starry ensemble drama: less State of Play and more The Paper.
Plan B are also setting up Jonathan Lethem's novel Fortress of Solitude, with Alfonso Gomez Rejon (second-unit on Babel) writing and directing. What other unsung hero from the Pitt back-catalogue might be about to get their big break behind the camera?