Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: Producers Paula Mazur, Mitchell Kaplan and Kevin McCormick have acquired screen rights to the Helen Simonson novel Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. Jack Thorne has been hired to write the script for a film that will be a co-production between the Mazur Kaplan Company and McCormick’s Warner Bros-based Langley Park Pictures. Published in 2010 by Random House, the book focuses on a retired and widowed British army major who falls in love with the Pakistani woman who runs their countryside village’s local convenience store. The novel his the bestseller list when it was published. Mazur Kaplan is funding development. Thorne is a British playwright whose first film was The Scouting Book for Boys. He just adapted the Nick Hornby novel A Long Way Down and has also written for the UK series Skins. UTA made the book deal for Barer Literary and Thorne’s repped by Casarotto Ramsay & Associates.