EXCLUSIVE: Netflix has optioned The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife, with Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster set to adapt the debut novel by Anna Johnston. The scribes brought the book to Netflix and will produce through their Blue Harp banner.
Frederick Fife was born with an extra helping of kindness in his heart. If he borrowed your car, he’d return it washed with a full tank of gas. The problem is there’s nobody left in Fred’s life to borrow from. At eighty-two, he’s desperately lonely, broke, and on the brink of homelessness. But Fred’s luck changes when, in a bizarre case of mistaken identity, he takes the place of grumpy Bernard Greer at the local nursing home.
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The writers have won the Peabody Award, the PEN Award, and the Humanitas Prize for their work as screenwriters. They’ve also been nominated for the Emmy, Golden Globe, People’s Choice, and multiple WGA Awards. They spent four seasons writing and producing Transparent, and were writers and exec producers on the Tom Hanks-starrer A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. They also wrote the sequel to Maleficent, and adapted the Jess Walter novel Beautiful Ruins for Amblin and Sam Mendes.
For Netflix, they served as showrunners and creators of the series Painkiller, which starred Matthew Broderick and Uzo Aduba in a drama about the growth of the opioid crisis. They recently finished scripting Bambi and Flight of the Navigator for Disney, as well as Dress, a TriStar film about the Black designer Anne Lowe who made Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress. They are working on the story of Fernando Valenzuela and the 1981 Dodgers with Alfonso Gomez-Rejon directing.
Deal was brokered by UTA, which reps the author along with Curtis Brown Australia, and reps the scribes with Kaplan/Perrone and Jamie Feldman.
