If you watched the Emmy Awards on Sunday you may have heard the name Adam Mazer. He won an Emmy for writing the HBO film You Don’t Know Jack starring Al Pacino as Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Fresh off the win, he’s gunning to 88 mph for an authorized biopic about John DeLorean, the controversial automobile mogul who is famous for his legal battles with the auto industry as well as having his car live in movie history in the Back to the Future trilogy.
Mazer is writing the script (with the working title DeLorean) for Steve Lee Jones, who served as an executive producer on Jack. Both love stories on subjects that are social relevant, with the rise and fall of John DeLorean being one of them. Previously, Mazer wrote the fact-based story Breach, a film that was directed by Billy Ray and starred Chris Cooper and Ryan Philippe.
The announcement of the John DeLorean biopic is the third such announcement, as there are at least two other projects about the mogul in development. However, this has the caveat of being the only one based on rights of many of DeLorean’s family. Rights were acquired from “DeLorean’s last wife Sally, his younger brother Charles, his former assistant and the DeLorean estate and has signed consulting agreements with several lawyers who repped the auto mogul.”
Biopics can be a hard sell in today’s marketplace. The 2008 release Flash of Genius was a fact-based tale about Bob Kearns’ legal battle with the Detroit auto giants regarding his invention of the intermittent windshield wiper. Even with an Oscar nominee in Greg Kinnear, it couldn’t find an audience.
But John DeLorean is a more well-known name if only for his contributions to his “Back to the Future car,” but Adam Mazer insists that the film will go beyond the scope of his legal battles. As he puts it, “[DeLorean] traveled the world, dated starlets, held 78 patents and of course was involved in huge legal battles. It is a big story.”
So in other words, “This is heavy.”
In addition to DeLorean, Mazer has two projects picking up steam. One is Rube which details the rise of the porn industry, and Contingency, about lawyers in the 1970s and ’80s who were among the first to advertise their legal services.
