Writer of Oscar-Nominated ‘Room’ to Pen ‘Frog Music’

Lenny Abrahamson‘s Room received much Oscar love last week, with the coveted power four quarter of nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Lead Performance (Brie Larson, favored to win), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Emma Donoghue). Donoghue, who adapted Room from her own novel, will be doing repeat performance for Frog Music, which she authored and will now adapt for the big screen, as first reported by Deadline.

Set in 1876 San Francisco during a record-breaking heat wave and smallpox epidemic, Frog Music is a thriller based on a true unsolved murder mystery of a young woman, Jenny Bonnet, with the main characters pulled from the social underside of the city. Bonnet’s friend, a French burlesque dancer, attempts to solve the murder and bring the perpetrator to justice, in so doing risking her own life and piecing together the secret life of her friend.

Donoghue is teaming up with Alison Owen and Debra Hayward’s Monumental Pictures. Owen said, “I couldn’t be more excited to be working with Emma, who deserves every bit of the huge success she is having with Room, an amazing book and an amazing movie,” She added, “Frog Music shares the same qualities of suspense and extraordinary characters, this time in a period setting, and I feel so privileged to shepherd it into an equally extraordinary movie.”

Owen is producing alongside Scott LaStaiti and his recently formed Palantir Group. LaStaiti recently produced Jane Got A Gun starring Natalie Portman, scheduled for release on January 29th. Owen recently produced Suffragette with Faye Ward and is currently in post-production on Justin Chadwick’s Tulip Fever for The Weinstein Co. Hayward, an executive producer on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and producer on Les Misérables, is producing Bridget Jones’s Baby, slated for release on September 16th.