Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: Warner Bros has just closed a high-six-figure deal to acquire the upcoming Howard Blum book Dark Invasion and will develop it as a star vehicle for Silver Linings Playbook‘s Oscar-nominated Bradley Cooper. Cooper and his 22nd & Indiana banner will produce with John Lesher and his Le Grisbi banner and Adam Kassan. The nonfiction book will be published by Crown/Random on 9/11/13. The date is significant, as the book is about what is considered the first attacks on U.S. soil since its formative years.

The book is a true spy thriller set in 1915 when Germany, with war raging in Europe and the U.S. still neutral, decides to send their Secret Service to America to wage a covert war to keep this country from helping the Allies. The Kaiser’s spies bomb factories, sabotage ships, shoot JP Morgan Jr (a financier of the Allies), bomb the U.S. Capitol Building, and set up an anthrax lab six miles from the White House. Cooper is attached to play NYPD Capt Tom Tunney, who’s tasked with establishing the team that will bring these German spies to justice. CIA considers Tunney to be its first head of homeland security, according to the book.

Deal was brokered by CAA and Janklow & Nesbit. CAA also reps Cooper. Blum’s last book, The Floor Of Heaven, is at Fox 2000 and Chernin Entertainment, and has a script by Scott Silver.