Emily Henry to adapt bestselling novel 'Funny Story' into movie: 'I have a draft for a script'
Emily Henry's novel, "Funny Story," is coming to the big screen.
On Tuesday, Lyrical Media and Ryder Picture Company, along with Henry, announced that "Funny Story" is getting the Hollywood treatment.
"I have a draft of a script, and as soon as I finish this letter to you, I'm diving back into it," Henry said in her newsletter, which featured a selfie of her holding the script for "Funny Story." "Because we're all chomping at the bit to get this made it [sic]."
Henry said that meetings with producing partners for the "Funny Story" adaptation began after the screenwriter's strike ended and she said that she felt that she was the "best person" to write the script for the book.
"Writing novels is a very solitary act, and I love it so much, ten out of ten, wouldn't change a thing. But there's a special and rare magic that can only happen when there's a meeting of the minds, when you find people you're able to create a shared flow state with," she said about her meeting and collaboration process with Ryder Picture Company and Lyrical Media.
"I love, so much, the feeling that when humans are together, we can become more than the sum of our parts," she continued. "It's like, having two or three or four brains, you open up all these tunnels between them, and there's all of this extra space. Artistic synergy."
"Funny Story" was published in April. Henry stopped by "Good Morning America" at the time to talk about the novel and said that it follows the character, Daphne Vincent, "who is this kind of uptight librarian who is engaged -- she thinks her life is perfect," Henry said.
"She's just moved to this new town to be with her fiancé, and then he breaks up with her for his childhood best friend Petra, and her whole life is thrown into chaos," Henry continued.
"To kind of find her footing, she has to move in with Petra's ex-boyfriend, so it's a mess … and we love a mess, at least at the start!" she said. "And they kind of figure out that maybe it's not the worst thing in the world because they could kind of lead their exes to think that maybe they're together now -- make 'em a little bit jealous. It's really fun."
Prior to writing the script for "Funny Story," Henry said in her newsletter that she had "no intention of writing the script myself."
"At the time, I'd only ever written one screenplay -- one single draft of it, and just for fun -- and aside from being someone who hates taking the risk of being bad at something, I also knew enough from my writer friends who'd gone before me in the adaptation process to know that a lot of studios and producers don't want novelists adapting their own work," she said. "So partly, I wanted the adaptations to just have their best shot at getting made. And partly, I just doubted myself too much to even try."
Henry said that after meeting with Ryder Picture Company and Lyrical Media, she was "eager to get going."
As for her other novels, which are also getting made into films: "Beach Read," "People We Meet on Vacation," and "Book Lovers," the romance writer said those are still in the works.
"We're still working to make beautiful adaptations of Beach Read, People We Meet on Vacation, and Book Lovers happen," she wrote in her newsletter. "And there are really exciting things I STILL can't share on each of those."
Since its publication, "Funny Story" has sold over 800,000 copies in North America, according to a press release.
