NEW YORK — “21” scribe Peter Steinfeld will adapt the lottery scam memoir “Money for Nothing” for Warner Independent Pictures, Michael De Luca Prods. and Tobey Maguire’s Maguire Entertainment.
WIP optioned Edward Ugel’s wry take on his experiences talking lottery winners into taking lump-sum cash payments against their future earnings — and pocketing a good chunk of change for himself in the process.
De Luca’s Alissa Phillips and ME’s Mark Ross will oversee the project for their companies. WIP creative executive Richard Gold will oversee for his studio.
Ugel’s HarperCollins book, subtitled “One Man’s Journey Through the Dark Side of Lottery Millions,” was published in September.
Next, Steinfeld will adapt the biography of Coinstar founder Herbert T. Ackerman, “8 9/10 Percent Of Nothing.” Following that, Steinfeld is slated to work on a big big-budget thriller about the troubled history of the two-dollar bill.
After that, he’ll write a big-screen version of how I once won four hundred dollars on a video poker machine.
Because I hate myself so completely, I continue to read Entertainment Weekly, and every week there’s at least one thing that boils my blood and causes me to involuntarily throw the magazine at my fireplace. This week it was an article about “stoner movies” in which the author boldly stated that pot movies make lots of money because they do. Way to go out on a limb! But it wasn’t the stupidity of the puff piece that made me mad given that I have been completely desensitized to inane puff pieces. What made me mad was Seth Rogan. He obviously feels he has made the best stoner movies to date. 
So I got a PlayStation 3 and there was this rebate for 5 Blu-ray discs – the catch was you could only select from a horribly crippled list of possibilities (and you had to select from different tiers with only a few titles available on each tier, making selection of 5 decent titles virtually impossible and causing this sentence to run on and on and on…). Anyway, I sent off the rebate 6-8 weeks ago and forgot about it. 
…as written in a text message to a friend while watching the movie: