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Paramount and Pitt take on 'Zombies'
Feb 27, 2007
by Stone Martindale Comic scribe J. Michael Straczynski, who also created the sci-fi series Babylon 5 has announced yesterday that he is writing the screenplay adaptation of the zombie book World War Z for Paramount, reports IGN. The Max Brooks novel was optioned last summer by Plan B, Brad Pitt's production company, and is subtitled, "An Oral History of the Zombie War." "You all know the novel World War Z?" asked Straczynski of his audience during a New York Comic-Con panel on Friday. "I'm adapting that for Paramount. For Brad Pitt potentially -- we'll see what happens. He might be the star in it. So things are going very well for a TV guy." IGN reports Straczynski notes the book needs to be modified in order to work as a movie, particularly because of the randon plot and time issues through the recollections of the survivors of a decade-long war against the zombies. "What you have to do is… the book, if you haven't read it, is a wonderful, wonderful book in an interview format after the zombie wars," explains Straczynski. "You see how we survived. It's very political, very smart, very cagey, but there's no main character. So you have to create who the interviewer is and give him some background and bring him from place to place to place to place. And they said, 'Feel free to get as political as you want, as incisive as you want, to play with it. You could look at this as a Katrina kind of catastrophe.' But I'm being very faithful to the book, letter by letter when I can, and I'm on about page 70 right now and I'm really happy with it. I'm really pleased with it actually, so if that goes well we might go into production on that one." 
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