Fox Searchlight has won the production rights to the first big manuscript of the year.
“Keeper of the Diary” follows Otto Frank as he goes in search of a publishing house that will print the diary of his daughter, Anne.
Of course Otto Frank lost his entire family in the holocaust, including his daughter Anne, who prior to her time in the death camps kept a diary of her life in hiding. Following the war Otto discovered the diary and dedicated his life to finding someone who would help him share the story with the world.
After years of rejection Frank met Barbara Zimmerman in 1950. An ambitious junior editor at Doubleday Publishing. Barbara saw the book’s potential to change the world and worked tirelessly to see that it get printed.
I have really high hopes for this film. The back story is always compelling, but this brings it to the forefront in a new way. And the time is more than right for a female heroine in a publishing icon like Barbara Zimmerman, who later went on to found the New York Review of Books.