JJ Abrams, Paramount Buy Rights to Real Life Puzzle House Story

A secret panel reveals a book with clues to the mystery in the Fifth Avenue puzzle house (photo courtesy of NY Times).

Variety reports that Paramount has bought the rights to an article that appeared in last Thursday’s New York Times about a family that allowed an architect to hide a series of puzzles and clues to a mystery in their home. JJ Abrams will produce the film. Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky are adapting Penelope Green’s original piece.

Supposedly the studio paid six figures for the rights. No word on how much of that Green gets and how much (if any) goes to the Times.

The article focused on a family that bought a Fifth Avenue townhouse that needed a total renovation. The wife gave the architect pretty much carte blanche to do whatever he wanted and to be creative. In response to the husband’s request that a poem he wrote about their family be hidden in the walls somewhere for future owners to find, the architect asked a writer friend to compose a mystery that he then turned into a series of clues in the house–cyphers on a radiator, mysteriously unlocking panels, keys and keyholes, and a matching soundtrack and book–that eventually led to the hidden poem. Over about an eighteen month period the family, including four lucky children, worked to solve the constantly unfolding mystery.

I would think that the filmmakers are going to fictionalize this to a large degree, probably turning it into a story where the family moves into a house and the children begin discovering a series of clues that were left there long ago by an eccentric genius or inventor or something like that. I don’t know whether audiences would have a lot of patience with the real story of watching an architect spend lots of money trying to entertain an exceptionally wealthy family.

No word on a director yet or how involved Abrams will be beyond producing.