David Boxerbaum of Verve joins us for this week’s Anatomy of a Sale. He explores what it’s like taking a small, intimate story and generating massive buzz around town, deciding which buyer to go with in the heat of a bidding war, and how one Friday afternoon changed two writer’s lives forever.
KEEPER OF THE DIARY
The story concerns Otto Frank’s struggle to find a publisher for his daughter’s diary, which became one of the enduring documents of the Holocaust. Only one woman was willing to help him change the world — an ambitious young editor named Barbara Zimmerman.
The film is a passion project for the producers, as Matti Leshem lost his grandmother in the Holocaust and his father is a survivor. Meanwhile, Branagh narrated the documentary Anne Frank Remembered, so the story is clearly near and dear to his heart as well.
The highly publicized spec Keeper of the Diary from Evan Kilgore and Samuel Franco has sold to Fox Searchlight for a six figure amount. Matti Leshem and Lynn Harris will produce under their Weimaraner Republic Pictures shingle.
The remarkable true story of two strangers from two very different worlds who fight to get Anne Frank’s diary published. Otto Frank, Anne’s father, and Barbara Zimmerman, a young editor at Doubleday Press and a fiercely independent woman determined to make her mark on the world and change it for the better.
The remarkable true story of two strangers from two very different worlds who fight to get Anne Frank’s diary published. Otto Frank, Anne’s father, and Barbara Zimmerman, a young editor at Doubleday Press and a fiercely independent woman determined to make her mark on the world and change it for the better.
