House Of Puzzles Perfect Subject For Paranoiac Cryptologist J.J. Abrams To Spin Into Family Film [Mystery On Fifth Avenue]

In a story from the NY Times that's almost too unbelievable to be true, a married couple of Wall Street investors—quite possibly the coolest eccentric rich parents currently living in America—had their Upper East Side residence custom retrofitted by a brilliant designer to hold more secret compartments, puzzles, games, and hidden treasures than Hogwarts Academy, all to delight their four young children. Beyond that, the apartment "even comes with its own book"— which Everything Is Illuminated author Jonathan Safran Foer was specially commissioned to compose—and its own soundtrack. Browsing the slide show tour is as mindblowing as it is mindbending, which, we suppose, makes it somehow fitting that Paramount has purchased the article for J.J. Abrams to adapt into a feature film:

Writers Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky have been hired to adapt it into a film, with Marc Evans overseeing for the studio.

Forbes and Wolodarsky, repped by ICM (which also handles rights for the Times), have TV comedy backgrounds — Forbes wrote on "The Larry Sanders Show" and Wolodarsky on "The Simpsons." They most recently wrote the Rainn Wilson comedy "The Rocker," due for release in August from Fox Atomic, and worked on "Monsters vs. Aliens," due for release in March from DreamWorks Animation.

Clearly, Paramount is seeing dollar-sign-shaped puffs of smoke floating out the chimney of this house of puzzling delights—a future classic that might one day stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Narnia, Pan's Labyrinth, Spiderwick, and the like. Perhaps they're even thinking franchise: If the story's heroes manage to solve the Mystery of the Really Expensive Upper East Side Townhouse by movie'...

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