Adaptive's upcoming film will put its unusual business model to the test

New York

THE forthcoming film Coin Heist - the tale of four prep-school students who try to rob the US Mint - will present the first big test of a new studio with an unusual business model.

Its approach? Buying other studios' abandoned scripts, and recycling the scraps into new franchises.

"We're basically rummaging through studio trash for stuff that's been discarded," said Perrin Chiles, a founding partner and chief executive of Adaptive Studios.

Mr Chiles is exaggerating only slightly. Hollywood movie studios are renowned for buying up scripts that never see the light of day. They are warehoused for years, even decades. Four years ago, Mr Chiles founded Adaptive to go dumpster-diving through these neglected screenplays, searching for the best of the worst. Adaptive turns the scripts into novels - which it then adapts into films or TV shows.

"We want the stuff where you have lost all hope," Mr Chiles said. "We will take the crumbs off anyone's table." One executive's crumbs can be another's all-you-can-eat buffet, apparently.

Adaptive has acquired 50 scripts, 25 from Miramax, and the rest from other studios, agencies and production companies. (Mr Chiles declined to say what Adaptive pays for bundles of scripts.) Through its publishing arm, Adaptive Books, the company has released a dozen books and plans to publish 18 more over the next year and a half. The novels include Pasta Wars, a romantic comedy for foodies; The Silence of Six, a teenage technology thriller; and DC Trip, Sara Benincasa's raunchy adult comedy about a high school trip to Washington that goes horribly wrong. Eight of the books are in development for film and television.

Adaptive is producing some projects on its own, such as Bleeding Earth, a postapocalyptic young adult novel that is being turned into a low budget indie horror movie; and Coin Heist, made for less than US$5 million. Others have been picked up by outside producers, including an adaptation of Air, a young adult novel by Ryan Gattis, which the musician-turned-producer John Legend has signed on to produce. Budgets range from indie (a few million dollars) to mid-range (US$40 million or more).

The company has also snapped up defunct TV properties. It recently revived Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's series Project Greenlight for HBO. The show received two Emmy nominations this month.

Adaptive executives said that their scavenging approach gives them an advantage over bigger studios that are competing for fresh scripts from writers who are in demand, or wrestling over the same picked-over comic book franchises.

Adaptive controls the intellectual property across all media, and uses the books to promote the films, which it hopes in turn will help book sales. The novels also offer a relatively inexpensive way to market-test high-concept stories - those with a simple, basic hook - and build an audience for a new franchise, Adaptive's executives said.

Booksellers have warmed to the concept. The company recently announced an unusual partnership with Barnes & Noble, which is giving prominent placement to Adaptive's titles in its 640 stores and has exclusive rights to sell the books for the first six months.

With the release of Coin Heist, which is now in postproduction, Adaptive faces its first big trial with audiences and critics.

The project has a long and tortured history going back to 1998, when a screenwriter, William Osborne, wrote a script titled The Hole With the Mint, an action-comedy about a British schoolteacher who recruits his former students to rob the Royal Mint. He sold the idea at the first pitch meeting and wrote three drafts, only to have it languish in the studio vault for 15 years.

Then, in 2013, Adaptive bought it as part of a bulk deal for 25 moribund Miramax scripts. Adaptive executives took the script apart. They changed the setting and condensed it into a five-page narrative blueprint. They auditioned five writers before hiring Elisa Ludwig to re-imagine the story as a young adult novel set in a Philadelphia prep school.

After the novel was published, they brought in a new screenwriter, Emily Hagins. She adapted it into a movie about four students who team up to rob the Philadelphia Mint. (Producers are describing it in Hollywood-speak as The Breakfast Club meets Ocean's Eleven.) The company paid Mr Osborne, whose screenwriting credits include Twins and The Scorpion King, a small fee of about US$1,000 and mentioned him in the book's acknowledgments.

"It was never going to go anywhere, and I thought, how great that it gets another life," said Mr Osborne, who added that he had 12 unproduced screenplays scattered at various studios. "So many of one's scripts just sit at the bottom shelf. It's a colossal waste."

A similar insight gave Mr Chiles the idea for Adaptive four years ago, when he was working as a documentary film producer. Many of his friends in Hollywood were busy writing and selling screenplays, but very few ever got made. The screenplays, which were obviously promising enough for studio heads to buy them, seemed like a vast, untapped resource in an industry where intellectual property is the chief currency.

Mr Chiles teamed up with two partners with producing backgrounds, TJ Barrack and Marc Joubert, to start Adaptive. Both had worked as consultants at Miramax, where Mr Joubert was tasked with combing through hundreds of unproduced screenplays to see what, if anything, could be salvaged.

Adaptive still has a lot to prove in Hollywood. The movie business is littered with companies that arrived with what sounded like a promising idea and never managed to gain traction. Making its job harder, Adaptive lacks a distribution partnership with a major studio. NYT