The so-called “Up house” in Seattle is getting a second life on the big screen.
EW has confirmed that Will Gluck (Annie, Easy A) is set to produce a film for Fox Searchlight based on the 100-year-old Seattle farmhouse whose owner, like the stubborn protagonist in Pixar’s film Up, refused to sell even as commercial development encroached. The news was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter.
The project is based on the relationship between owner Edith Macefield and the construction project’s superintendent Barry Martin, with whom she struck up a close friendship even as a mall was built around her home. When she died in 2008, she willed her house to Martin. (It’s now owned by a nonprofit aiming to move the house to another location.) Rights to Martin’s memoir, Under One Roof: Lessons I Learned from a Tough Old Woman in a Little Old House, are also part of the deal with Fox Searchlight.
No director is attached, but Gluck is set to produce with his Olive Bridge Entertainment partner Jodi Hildebrand, from a script by John Whittington.
Despite the similarities between Macefield and Pixar’s protagonist Carl Fredricksen, the animation studio has denied that Up is based on the Seattle abode.
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