The exquisite torture of having a book optioned for film and television

Last fall, I signed an agreement with a boutique production company to develop Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech for film, television, and stage. In July, the guy who wrote Saving Private Ryan was hired to write the screenplay for the as yet untitled Henry Ford film.

That is an absurd paragraph to write. It’s every historian’s dream to see their painstaking work on the big or little screen. As the project has now developed to the stage where a screenwriter has been hired, it seems reasonable to talk about how it evolved and what the process of signing an option agreement has been like. In this blog entry, I’ll talk about how my book came to have a “hook” into present-day events. In the next, I’ll describe how the option process worked, at least for me.

When I tell people about the film, they gasp audibly. That is fun, you betcha. I didn’t write the book with its cinematic possibilities anywhere near my consciousness. Unless you discount the fact that my then assistant, who had an extensive background in theater, and I had many conversations about who we’d cast. But that was just a bit of fun, a healthy distraction, a different kind of creativity. The slog of writing the manuscript punctured the fantasy.

The book was published in 2012, smack dab in the middle of the Obama era. The day after my book launch event, the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act. Attacks on affirmative action were met with policies committed to eliminating discrimination and making access to education possible for people from all walks of life. Immigration simmered on low heat at that time. And antisemitism in America seemed like an anachronism, shrunk to the private interpersonal exchanges of small, elite groups. In other words, normal life. And Henry Ford’s War met a standard scholarly reception, as befitted a standard scholarly book. The reviews were almost all published in academic journals, and you can see them on this website here.

Then, three years later, Donald Trump ran for president, explicitly attacking Mexicans and immigrants in crude terms that made overt racism fashionable again.

Jews were not spared. In 2016, even before his election, cemeteries and synagogues were defaced and vandalized across the country; the violence picked up in tempo after his victory. White nationalist groups started pamphleting universities and businesses, brazenly looking to recruit. And then, not even a year later, the Klan, the Proud Boys, pro-Confederate groups, right-wing militia organizations, and neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, shouting “Jews will not replace us!”

I knew then that Henry Ford was relevant again, a century after he published his horrifically antisemitic newspaper. I wrote about Charlottesville and the murders of Jews in their places of worship, connecting the dots. It wasn’t difficult; both synagogue shooters had copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in their possession when they were arrested. Antisemitic ideas seem remarkably resistant to change; the charge that Jews control the press goes back to the 19^th century. But I didn’t get famous doing this writing. I didn’t know if anyone was even reading my book at that point. My Washington Post articles didn’t bring me commissions from national media.

What I didn’t know was that a producer who had helped run projects for Spielberg and Clooney had formed his own company in 2022 specifically to develop films that told Jewish stories. My book suited his purposes. That is a function, it seems to me, entirely of luck. These events all lined up, led to the option agreement, out of random chance. Facilitated hugely (dare I say “yugely”?) by Donald Trump.