Leonardo DiCaprio & Martin Scorsese to take David Grann's "Killers of the Flower Moon" to the screen. #book2movies

Great news for my fellow book2movie buffs: director Martin Scorsese and muse, Leonardo DiCaprio, are developing a screen adaptation of David Grann's most recent book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.  

Oscar-winning screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) is penning the script. It will take awhile, Scorsese, in preproduction on the Irishman, wants to finish that film first.

Here's the lowdown on Killers of the Flower Moon from the people at Penguin/Random House/Doubleday

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

      Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more members of the tribe began to die under mysterious circumstances. 

      In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen like J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes like Al Spencer, the “Phantom Terror,” roamed—many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll climbed to more than twenty-four, the FBI took up the case. It was one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations and the bureau badly bungled the case. In desperation, the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only American Indian agents in the bureau. The agents infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest techniques of detection.  Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history. 

      In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann revisits a shocking series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. Based on years of research and startling new evidence, the book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, as each step in the investigation reveals a series of sinister secrets and reversals. But more than that, it is a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward American Indians that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long. Killers of the Flower Moon is utterly compelling, but also emotionally devastating.

Plenty of time to read the true crime story before it hits theaters which reminds me, weren't Leo and Scorsese going to adapt The Devil in the White City? Whatever happened to that? We started talking about that one back in 2015!

Grann, a staff writer at The New Yorker is also the best selling author of The Lost City of Z. The screen adaptation from James Gray is available to stream on Amazon now. His article The Old Man and the Gun is currently in postproduction right now but we'll be watching for it come 2018. The film stars Robert Redford, Elizabeth Moss and Casey Affleck, the kind of star power I can't resist.