There’s overnight success, and then there’s … well, there’s whatever you call success that arrives nine months before overnight success. Take Rebecca Serle, whose as-yet-unpublished first novel, the Romeo and Juliet twist When You Were Mine, will be released in May. Hollywood is so hot for it, the odds are now actually good that it will become a finished feature film even before it hits booksellers. What’s more, Vulture has learned exclusively that Fox 2000 Pictures is in discussions with Keira Knightley about starring.
Serle, 26, graduated with an MFA from the New School in the spring of 2009. Less than a year later, she’d finished her worm’s-eye view of Shakespeare’s great tragedy — one told from the perspective of the normally silent Rosaline, whom Romeo first claims to love from afar before he spots Juliet; Serle explores Rosaline falling in love with Romeo’s cousin, Benvolio. Last October, Mine sold to Simon & Schuster, and by November, the feature-film rights had gone, too.
In short order, Fox-based director Shawn Levy came aboard to produce, with (500) Days of Summer screenwriters Scott Neustader and Michael H. Weber hired to adapt it into the romance Rosaline. Michael Sucsy (HBO’s Grey Gardens, and next February’s Rachel McAdams–Channing Tatum weeper, The Vow) was hired to direct.
We’re cautioned that discussions with Knightley’s reps are nascent, but insiders say she’s both the studio and producer Shawn Levy’s first choice to play Rosaline. (Though, Pirates of the Caribbean haters, take note: We hear Lily Collins of The Blind Side is a strong contender, too.)
While this is familiar ground for Fox, which released Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet in 1996, we hear Neustadter and Weber’s script is a photo-negative of that film. While Luhrmann’s film used Shakespeare’s sixteenth-century dialogue in the present day, Rosaline will be set in the sixteenth century, but will employ modern-day speech.
Rebecca Serle.Photo: Patrick McMullan