After what the company described as a “highly competitive situation,” Neon has won the rights to develop Dorothy Baker’s novel Cassandra at the Wedding, in partnership with Seaview, the Broadway production company that has expanded into film and TV, and John Early.
Playwright Sarah DeLappe — who recently wrote A24’s SXSW-bowing Bodies, Bodies, Bodies — will adapt the book for the screen and executive produce. Neon will produce the film, with Brad Becker-Parton and Greg Nobile on behalf of Seaview, along with Early and Leslie Conliffe from Intellectual Property Group.
First published in 1962, Cassandra at the Wedding follows Cassandra Edwards, a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-wracked, and miserable. At the beginning of the novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding.
The deal was negotiated by Mason Speta at Neon and Conliffe, on behalf of McIntosh & Otis, the primary agents for the estate of Dorothy Baker.
Cassandra at the Wedding joins Neon’s growing production and development slate, which includes a narrative remake of hit doc The Painter and the Thief, Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool starring Alexander Skarsgård, Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo starring Hunter Schafer, John Malkovich, Gemma Chan and Sofia Boutella, Joshua Oppenheimer’s Tilda Swinton-starring golden-age musical The End, and documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon from director Jazmin Jones. The studio recently landed a total of six Oscar nominations for Flee, Spencer and The Worst Person in the World.
DeLappe — who also wrote the play The Wolves, which received the American Playwriting Foundation’s inaugural Relentless Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama amongst other honors and nominations — is repped by Odenkirk Provissiero Entertainment, ICM Partners and Schreck Rose Dapello Adams Berlin & Dunham.