Film Rights to Nobody Nowhere

Hollywood News

So you heard there was going to be a film made of my book Nobody Nowhere?

Well, Touchstone Pictures, together with Julia Roberts' company, Shoelace Productions, did have the original option to the film rights to Nobody Nowhere for five years whilst they struggled to come up with a working script. The rights were then sold to another Hollywood film company for another few years as more writer's struggled to envision how to convert the international bestselling book into film. Then it was resold again. This time, though, something different happened.

When a company buys the option to develop a film the first step is finding a writer. In the case of Nobody Nowhere this means finding someone who can envision how to take a story that spans 26 years and takes around 48 hours to read non-stop in a book, and condense that into a film which is around two hours long. The 26 year span in Nobody Nowhere covers three different continents and the main character, Donna, would have to be captured at several different ages. No matter how incredible a book is, if they can't envision converting the power of that book into a film of about 2 hrs length, then they get stuck. We were waiting for someone who could do that successfully.

In the process of reading potential scripts, I mapped the structures and tricks used in scriptwriting. I am a natural systematician. I feel systems intuitively and I map them just like an architect can feel out the structure of a building, an engineer can feel out the mechanisms in a tool, a linguist can map the structure of languages. I mapped the system of scriptwriting. Like with writing, art, sculpture and music, however, I had no idea that I could actually write a film script. It wasn't until the second producer, through his year long correspondence with me said he felt that the person who would ultimately be the best one to write the film script would be me that I considered that a serious possibility. Magically, I encountered a wonderful, funny, fountain named Beverly Nero, and our email conversation turned to film writes and the fact that Nobody Nowhere was once again up for option. Beverly Nero (daughter of Grammy award winning composer Peter Nero) picked up the option, and supported my belief I might write the screenplay. Just as Nobody Nowhere was written in 4 weeks, so was my first draft of the screenplay. The book went on to become an international best seller.

The film, Nobody Nowhere is now under option and in active development. The movie is set in the UK, throughout England and Wales, over to greater Europe and tells the Australian side of the story from Donna's perspective.

The focus of the film would be on the year that changed everything, Donna's 26th year, an invitation to journey into a depth only touched on in the book.

It was the year I first met 'the Welshman', 'Sion', a soldier with multiple fractures of the soul and more than one battle on his hands who became my real life 'mirror' after which the cold flat glass surface of my best friend, my mirror reflection, could no longer compare. And it was in this year that I stood on the edge of a breakdown but instead found my scream through the writing of Nobody Nowhere, the book that came to give a dynamic, human, real-life living face to the word Autism and explode the existing stereotypes laying bare its incredible diversity and ultimately the essential humanness we all share.

Nobody Nowhere dramatically changed the treatment, the education and the statistics forever of those with Developmental Differences and opened the doors for worldwide social, political and cultural changes in that field. More than this, Nobody Nowhere was read by 'ordinary people' and those on the peripheries alike, ironically giving a voice to many non-autistic men and women around the world as they felt gripped and swept up, often deeply exposed through my own story to their own deeply hidden, sometimes imprisoning truths.

Commuters on the motorway in Toronto listening to me on the renowned CBS Morningside program of the lovely late Peter Gzowski were so gripped by what they heard they pulled over onto the hard shoulder to listen. The much loved late Peter Jennings flew to London to capture my story for his Person Of The Week show on America's ABC.

Nobody Nowhere sold over half a million copies in 20 languages worldwide, and has been read by millions more. Covering deep social issues far beyond the scope of Autism, it challenges concepts of sanity and normality in the face of ignorance, brutality and deprivation and brought empathy and an inspiring sense of celebration and hope to mainstream people and solace to a diversity of the most marginalized, disempowered and alone people in society. The film, Nobody Nowhere is for all of these people.

Nobody Nowhere was, is and has always been more than 'an autism story'.

We are more than the packages we come in and sometimes when we open those packages we surprise ourselves and all those we touch.

If you would like more information about the film, please join the mailing list for announcements about "Nobody Nowhere" the film.

To contact the producer please email : NobodyNowhereLLC(at)socal.rr.com