It's a morning for doorstop thriller adaptations. Spielberg is circling Matt Helm, and, once again according to the ever-reliable Variety, Ron Howard has been attached to direct The Parsifal Mosaic, from the novel by Robert Ludlum.
Ludlum is one of those authors (like Alistair MacLean and Virginia Andrews) whose death has not stopped his publishing career, but The Parsifal Mosaic is a genuine, non-ghostwritten Ludlum thriller from 1982. An American intelligence agent catches a glimpse of his supposedly dead KGB double-agent lover at a train station, and begins a globe-trotting pursuit, while his former employers, believing him to have gone nuts, send agents to terminate him.
The script is being written by David Self (Road to Perdition, The Wolf Man) and the project is being set up at Universal alongside a fourth film about another Ludlum creation: a certain Jason Bourne.
Shades of Vertigo in that dead / not dead lover scenario? Or is that hoping for too much?