Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: Producers Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald have acquired film rights to Other Desert Cities, the Jon Robin Baitz stage play. Parkes/MacDonald used the development fund it launched with Imagenation Abu Dhabi to make the deal. Baitz will write the script and will co-produce, with Parkes and MacDonald producing. They haven’t yet involved a studio.

The play opened on Broadway at the Booth Theatre this month after a run last season at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre. In the play, Stacy Keach and Stockard Channing play an old Hollywood couple who’d once counted Ronald and Nancy Reagan as close friends. Their retirement to Palm Springs is upended by continuing friction with their kids, a reality TV producer and a novelist daughter who has gotten past her writer’s block by writing a tell-all memoir that bares family secrets.

Parkes and MacDonald produced the screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sweeney Todd, and they adapted Catch Me If You Can, for the stage (they produced the film). They are currently in production on the Robert Zemeckis-directed Flight starring Denzel Washington, and they are in post-production on Men In Black 3D, which Sony releases May 25, 2012.