‘Sting’ Producer Buys Film Rights to Dunne’s ‘Season’

Veteran producer David Brown has purchased the film rights to Dominick Dunne’s novel “A Season in Purgatory,” whose story about a ruthless Irish-American family from New England has inspired comparisons to the Kennedys.

Dunne’s bestseller had been shopped around Hollywood in November but was withdrawn after some studios and producers indicated it might make a better TV miniseries. Under the surface, however, were concerns that the politically influential Kennedy clan might not take well to the murder mystery in which a son clubs a young girl to death.

Brown (“A Few Good Men,” “The Sting”) signed a deal Wednesday in New York with Dunne’s agent, but terms were not disclosed. Brown, whose career has included a long tenure at 20th Century Fox, will produce the film for his company, the Manhattan Project.

Brown said he will now attempt to hire a screenwriter and then try to sell the project to the studios.

“I will go out like Willy Loman with my sample case,” he said. “If I can’t get a studio, then my intention is to get private financing.”

Brown, wanting to distance the project from the Kennedys, scoffed at the suggestion that the story is an unflattering portrayal of the family.

“I would never take living persons and portray them without their approval,” Brown said.

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Brown said that he understands why the studios were reluctant at first to go after the book but that he thinks studio executives were “sidetracked” by the controversy.

“I think they’re wrong, because I don’t think they have given proper attention to the dramatic potential and entertainment potential of the book,” he said.

Dunne’s novels depict society’s upper crust. In “An Inconvenient Woman” he wrote about the murder of a prominent man’s mistress, which some believe was modeled on the real-life murder of millionaire Alfred Bloomingdale’s mistress.

At the center of “A Season in Purgatory” is the social-climbing Bradley family, who live in splendor in Connecticut.

While Dunne has insisted in interviews that the Bradleys are not the Kennedys, critics have drawn their own conclusions:

“The patriarch, a one-time ambassador to a European capital, is a philandering, controversial, self-made businessman with a shillelagh-size chip on his shoulder,” wrote the Boston Globe. “The matriarch is a super-pious clotheshorse who overlooks her husband’s flaunted affairs, cultivates high-church prelates, neglects her children while traveling frequently to Paris and Rome . . . .”

Then there are the children, including a son who is a war hero killed in combat and a mentally affected daughter shut away in an institution. The family has high hopes that one son will become President of the United States.

“Whoa!” wrote the critic for the Washington Post, “don’t we know these people from somewhere?”

Brown said he became interested in Dunne’s novel when his wife, Cosmopolitan magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown, read it and raved.

“My wife, who has plenty to read as editor of Cosmo, read it and I couldn’t get her attention for about two days,” Brown said. “Meals were late. I had to wait for them. She said, ‘This is the best book I’ve read since ‘The Godfather.’ ”

Brown said he read the book and immediately became mesmerized.

“What I liked about it is it’s a morality tale,” he said. “More than that, it has . . . suspense, mystery, great sex and wonderful characters.”