Sonar enters Clooney’s Smokehouse

Sonar Entertainment is teaming up with the prodco founded by George Clooney and Grant Heslov and the duo behind Netflix’s Making a Murderer to adapt a serialised Huffington Post article for television.

Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos’ Making a Murderer

Drama specialist Sonar and Smokehouse Pictures have entered into a first-look deal with the first project set to be a scripted adaptation of Steven Brill’s America’s Most Admired Lawbreaker articles.

Making a Murderer duo Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos will adapt the pieces with Nicki Paluga directing alongside them.

Brill’s work focuses on the true story of a pharmaceutical company that aggressively marketed a powerful drug to children and the elderly while hiding data about its side effects. It was eventually fined US$2bn but made in the region of US$30bn in worldwide sales.

The collaboration between the two firms continues Smokehouse’s push into television and will see drama and comedy projects worked on for cablenets and streamers.

Smokehouse was launched by Clooney and Heslov in 2006. It already has Ms, a miniseries about the founding of Ms Magazine, set up at HBO, while The Studio, a drama about a movie studio in the 1990s, is in the pipeline at Showtime.

The partnership is the latest in a series of first-look deals for Sonar, which is also working with Ridley Scott’s Scott-Free Productions and StoryBy Entertainment.

The announcement was made by Heslov and Sonar Entertainment CEO Thomas Lesinski.