The book isn't published until the summer, but Sony has already grabbed the screen rights to Ben Mezrich's true-life heist thriller **Sex on the Moon. Nobody goes to the moon, and there's not much sex in it. But hey, a snappy title is a snappy title.
Central to the story is Thad Roberts, a NASA intern and one time potential astronaut who persuaded his girlfriend and another accomplice to help him steal the moon rocks in NASA's vault. The ensuing adventure is "a madcap thrill ride of genius, love and duplicity" with the Ocean's Eleven style hook of the crime's seeming total impossibilty. That and the mystery of the theft's pointlessness: what's Thad actually going to do with the rocks once he's got them?
Mezrich previously wrote The Accidental Billionaires, the book that became The Social Network, and Sex on the Moon already shares some of that film's creative DNA. Scott Rudin, Michael DeLuca and Dana Brunetti are producing, with Kevin Spacey executive producing.
Mezrich's research sounds like it's been meticulous: trawling through FBI files and speaking to everyone remotely involved in the story. But we're liking the word "madcap", and with the suggestion that Roberts may not have been all he seemed, there's an Informant! vibe to this that's got us interested. More details as they emerge...