International Idea Leisure is creating “The Ideal Man,” a thriller centered on Jim Thompson — the previous CIA operative who constructed one in all Thailand’s most acknowledged way of life manufacturers earlier than vanishing with out clarification in 1967.
The script is ready in the course of the Vietnam Battle, with the story hinging on Thompson’s suspicious disappearance on the battle’s peak and the vary of suspects implicated within the case.
Principal pictures is predicted to start in Bangkok in mid-2027. A director is being finalized. The undertaking is being shopped to patrons on the Cannes Film Market.
The Los Angeles and Vancouver-based firm has tapped Dorothy Kozak Snoke, repped by Zero Gravity, to put in writing the screenplay. Snoke is adapting the script from Joshua Kurlantzick’s biography “The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War.” Snoke and Michael Belyea are producing.
Belyea is an impartial producer primarily based in Los Angeles and Vancouver who focuses on worldwide storytelling. He beforehand labored at UTA, twentieth Century Fox and Sony Footage. International Idea Leisure is a movie and tv manufacturing firm specializing in native tales for a worldwide viewers.
Dylan Tarason and Michael Rifkin function government producers. Tarason’s credit embody “Hell or High Water” and the upcoming Hulu and PCCW Media Hong Kong thriller collection “The Season.” Rifkin beforehand served as co-head of Sony Footage Worldwide Prods. Bangkok-based Residing Movies, whose credit embody FX’s “Alien: Earth,” will deal with on-location manufacturing providers in Thailand.
“Joshua Kurlantzick’s book brilliantly lays out the intense geopolitics of Cold War Southeast Asia, then layers in one extraordinary protagonist and shows how the clash between U.S. ideals and reality played out directly in Jim Thompson’s life,” Belyea stated.
The movie is being developed in affiliation with the Jim Thompson Thai Silk Firm, which Thompson based in 1951 to revive conventional Thai silk manufacturing. The model — which lately celebrated its seventy fifth anniversary and was featured in Season 3 of “The White Lotus” — takes in textiles, vogue, house furnishings, hospitality, retail and artwork. Many years on from Thompson’s disappearance, his former Bangkok residence stays one of many nation’s most-visited vacationer websites.
“The Jim Thompson story is an incredible combination of passion, intrigue, patriotism and unsolved true crime. His disappearance is an enduring mystery that fascinates countless amateur sleuths to this day and begs to be brought to the big screen with A-list talent,” Rifkin stated.
“The enduring legacy and mystery of Jim Thompson is a story that has fascinated visitors to Thailand for decades. As a thriller and unsolved mystery, it has great potential for global reach,” Tarason added.
