After landing the rights to the forthcoming memoir from Tanya Smith, Netflix is partnering up with Issa Rae (The Lovebirds) and David Heyman (The Secret Garden) to produce a feature adaptation of The Ghost in the Machine, according to Deadline.
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The memoir, which is set to hit shelves in 2021, tells the story of Smith, a middle-class black girl from the North Side of Minneapolis who would go on to, in the words of the FBI, “become one of the single biggest threats to the entire United States banking system” as she creates a sophisticated wire fraud scheme and outwits the authorities and prosecutors until her life eventually fell apart and she was sent to prison. After two escapes, she would finally serve 13 years of a 24-year sentence, which at the time was the longest sentence handed down to any white-collar criminal, with the novel chronicling her rise and her coming to terms with her past and rebuild her life.
Rae is set to produce via her Issa Rae Productions banner, with Montrel McKay and Sara Rastogi overseeing for the company, while Heyman will produce through his Heyday Films banner, with Jillian Share and Jeffrey Clifford overseeing the project for the latter.
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Ghost in the Machine becomes the latest project Rae has added to her production roster after it was announced in late July she would be teaming with Jordan Peele and Universal Pictures to produce an adaptation of the short story Sinkhole with the possibility to also star in the horror film. The 35-year-old co-creator and star of Insecure also recently produced the musical documentary Dark City Beneath the Beat and worked with Netflix for the romantic-comedy The Lovebirds, which was acquired by the streaming service from Paramount Pictures as theaters experienced shutdowns across the country.
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