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Brad Pitt and Paramount Join the Search for the Lost City of Z

by Alex Billington
April 1, 2008
Source: Variety

Brad Pitt's production company, Plan B Entertainment, is really kicking things into high gear. Paramount just preemptively bought Lost City of Z, the latest project in development under Pitt's banner. In addition to that film, Plan B also has The Time Traveler's Wife, Atlas Shrugged, and World War Z in the works. While no director or writer is attached yet, Lost City of Z is being setup for Pitt to star in and sounds pretty intriguing despite being in this early stage of development. The film is based on a David Grann manuscript about the search for a lost city in the Amazon.

David Grann's forthcoming non-fiction book focuses on British explorer Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, whom Pitt would play, who went searching for the so-called City of Z in the Amazon, but he and his party disappeared in 1925. Over the last 70 years, countless explorers have tried and failed to retrace Fawcett's path, including a 1996 expedition of Brazilian adventurers. Grann previously wrote another article titled "City of Water" that was published in the New Yorker and later also picked up by Paramount.

After doing a quick bit of research on the expedition and story, it sounds like Fawcett ended up dead at the hands of a native tribe, although that was later also proven to be false. Time has an interesting article on Fawcett's expedition and the recent discoveries. One area that interested me was what Fawcett recalled encountering in his memoirs of earlier expeditions to the Brazilian Amazon: "crocodiles everywhere, spiders that can catch birds, anacondas more than 60 ft. long that wail disturbingly in the jungle night, bloodsucking cockroaches, 2-in. biting ants, hordes of vampire bats, rivers full of stingrays, electric eels and shoals of tiny, man-eating piranha." Sound like the makings of a good movie?

This definitely sounds like an interesting project, another one that I'll be keeping my eye on (there seem to be a lot of those nowadays). I'm curious - do projects like this interest anyone else as well, or is it simply an amusement that you'll be reminded of later once it actually moves into production?

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