Warner Brothers has purchased The Imitation Game, a spec script about English mathematician Alan Turing who led the country’s codebreaking efforts during World War Two, from first-time screenwriter Graham Moore.
Deadline is reporting that the studio beat out several smaller, indie studios for the script, paying seven figures for the script. Leonardo DiCaprio is said to have “the inside track” on playing Turing and Ron Howard is reportedly interested in directing. Both DiCaprio and Howard have production deals with the studio, so it is easy to see that Warners is willing to spend some money to keep them happy.
Moore developed his screenplay from Andrew Hodges’ definitive biography Alan Turing: The Enigma, with first-time producers Nora Grossman and Ido Ostrowsky. Moore has recently published his first novel The Sherlockian.
Turing is an amazing figure and one of the most influential of the 20th century. His mathematical genius helped the Allied effort to decipher Nazi communiqués that were encrypted through their Enigma machine, while the theories he developed during and after the war were instrumental in the creation of the computer. Tragically, in 1952 he was prosecuted for being a homosexual, which was still a crime in Great Britain at that time, and died two years later, a possible suicide.
