David Mamet tackles Anne Frank

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet has teamed up with Disney to write and direct a new film version of the The Diary of Anne Frank, Variety reports. To retell the inspiring yet tragic story, Mamet will use as his source material the beloved journal of the young Jewish girl who hid with her family from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic. He’ll also use the play based on the diary by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, both of whom also wrote the script for the 1959 George Stevens-directed film, which won three Oscars. Mamet “sparked to the opportunity to tell the story,” the entertainment daily reports, and is already writing the script. It’s expected that Mamet, whose parents are of Russian-Jewish extraction, will bring “his own original take on the material that could re-frame the story as a young girl’s rite of passage.”

Variety