Akashic Books
Seriously this book is one joke and it’s like 200 words long. Why does it need to be a movie? Adam Mansbach’s Go The F-ck To Sleep was the surprise publishing hit of 2011, selling half a million copies to mommies and daddies too pissed off to deal with their little ones refusing to go to bed. It’s a cute book, and it made Akashic, the tiny publishing company that put it out, a whole hell of a lot of money. Samuel L. Jackson read the audiobook version (it’s four and a half minutes long). Everything should have ended there.
But, of course, it didn’t. In 2011, Fox optioned the movie rights to the book. We’ve seen similarly slight childrens books turned into movies before, with varying levels of success. Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs was acceptable. Where The Wild Things Are was just weird. But both of those books were longer than Go The F-ck To Sleep, and actually had characters and a narrative arc, not just a few rhymes and some F-bombs. But where there’s money, there’s Hollywood, and the adaptation is moving forward.
Deadline has the scoop that a screenwriting team has been tapped to bring the book to filmable form. The first take will be written by the husband and wife team of Ken Marino and Erica Oyama. The pair had previously collaborated on the Web series Burning Love, which built a lot of buzz over the course of three seasons. Marino also is notable for his roles on Veronica Mars and Party Down.
So how are these two going to tackle this daunting task? The book has a lot of drawings of tigers in it, maybe they’ll go the Life of Pi route? I’m sure you can get some of that CGI pretty cheap since all the companies went out of business. What do you think would make a Go The F-ck To Sleep movie work in theaters?