Brad Pitt has bought the rights to The Imperfectionists, a novel by Tom Rachman about a dying newspaper in Rome.
Canada’s National Post reported on Wednesday that Pitt’s production company, Plan B Entertainment, won the bidding war for Rachman’s acclaimed first novel.
We haven’t read the book, but Christopher Buckley loved it and the National Post’s description is enticing: “The book is a two-track narrative in which chapter-long character sketches of the newspaper’s staff (and one reader) are interspersed with a chronology of the paper’s development (or, lack thereof). The unnamed paper, founded in the 1950s, is trying to forge a future without modern technology.”
No word yet on whether Pitt (pictured, obviously) will star in the film, but here’s hoping that if he does, his journalist get-up includes that scraggly goatee thing he’s been wearing lately.