Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: Paramount is wrapping up a seven-figure deal for screen rights to the Jonathan Tropper novel One Last Thing Before I Go. The film will be produced by JJ Abrams through the Bad Robot banner. The book will be published in August by Dutton. The deal was made in an competitive situation with multiple studios involved. The deal includes Tropper writing the script.

Here’s the logline: Book focuses on Silver, a man in full midlife crisis. He has begun to accept that life isn’t going to turn out as he expected, with his ex about to marry a  guy too nice for Silver to hate. And his Princeton-bound teenage daughter Casey has just confided in him that she’s pregnant — because he’s the one she cares least about letting down. With the wedding looming and Casey in crisis, this broken family struggles, bonds, and comes together only to risk damaging each other even more. Silver has another major complication: he discovers he could die at any moment without an operation he refuses to have.

Tropper’s other novels include This Is Where I Leave You (set up at Warner Bros with Adam Shankman directing Tropper’s script), The Book Of Joe, and Everything Changes. Tropper is also famous (in my book, anyway) for writing an adaptation of the Mary Chase play Harvey that was good enough to get Steven Spielberg sparked up to commit to direct, until Tom Hanks said no and the iconic film proved difficult enough to cast that Spielberg moved on to other projects. The script got Tropper scripting jobs that included Kodachrome for Fox, Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps and the Gotham Group. Tropper is currently in production on the Cinemax series Banshee, which he created with David Schickler. They are exec producing with Alan Ball.

The deal was brokered by UTA on behalf of Tropper and New York publishing agent Simon Lipskar of Writers House.