“Love & Mercy” scribe to adapt memoir “On the Brinks” for Focus

PanARMENIAN.Net - Focus has picked up On the Brinks, a drama package that includes the best-selling memoir by Samuel Ignatius Millar, The Hollywood Reporter reveals.

Michael Lerner, who co-wrote the acclaimed Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy, is set to pen the script adapting the book.

Stephen L’Heureux and Alissa Phillips are on board to produce, as are Ireland-based Morgan Bushe and Tom Collins.

Millar was a member of the Irish Republican Army who spent eight years in tough Irish prisons during the late 1970s and 1980s, where he took part in the blanket protest in which political prisoners refused to wear prison garb and were severely punished for it. He then came to America under a different identity, reinventing himself as a family man and comic book shop owner.

But then he helped pull off an armored truck heist, stealing more than $7 million from a Brink’s truck and executing one of the most successful heists in U.S. history.

Millar was eventually pardoned by President Bill Clinton and sent back to Ireland, where he reinvented himself once again, this time as a best-selling author of crime books.

Josh McLaughlin will shepherd the project for Focus.

L’Heureux was a producer on Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, while Phillips was a co-producer on the Brad Pitt baseball drama Moneyball and the recent Dracula Untold. Bushe and Collins are Irish producers with numerous credits.

Lerner co-wrote last year’s well-regarded Wilson biopic that starred Paul Dano and John Cusack as the Beach Boys' mastermind in two different periods. The former Newsweek journalist is currently working on a one-hour drama series for Sony TV.