Scarlett Johansson, Jay Roach, and Kristin Gore Take The Psychopath Test

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Another book-to-film adaptation is heading our way, and this one has a pretty impressive pedigree! Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment have set screenwriter Kristin Gore (daughter of Al) to write a psychological thriller based on Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test.

Per Deadline, Scarlett Johansson is attached to star with Jay Roach (Meet the Parents) directing. Brian Grazer will produce along with Roach and his Everyman Pictures banner and Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey. Erica Huggins and Jennifer Perini will be exec producers.

Published by Picador and Riverhead Books, The Psychopath was a bestseller here in the US and in the UK. They say one out of every hundred people is a psychopath, devoid of empathy, manipulative, deceitful, charming, seductive, and delusional. The book explores their world and the madness industry.

Book Synopsis:
In this madcap journey, a bestselling journalist investigates psychopaths and the industry of doctors, scientists, and everyone else who studies them.

The Psychopath Test is a fascinating journey through the minds of madness. Jon Ronson’s exploration of a potential hoax being played on the world’s top neurologists takes him, unexpectedly, into the heart of the madness industry. An influential psychologist who is convinced that many important CEOs and politicians are, in fact, psychopaths teaches Ronson how to spot these high-flying individuals by looking out for little telltale verbal and nonverbal clues. And so Ronson, armed with his new psychopath-spotting abilities, enters the corridors of power. He spends time with a death-squad leader institutionalized for mortgage fraud in Coxsackie, New York; a legendary CEO whose psychopathy has been speculated about in the press; and a patient in an asylum for the criminally insane who insists he’s sane and certainly not a psychopath.

Ronson not only solves the mystery of the hoax but also discovers, disturbingly, that sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.

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