BOOK IT

DreamWorks options “The Zebra Murders: A Season of Killing, Racial Madness and Civil Rights” by Prentice Earl Sanders and Bennett Cohen, the story of a racially driven killing spree in San Francisco in 1973-74 that left 15 white people dead and injured eight others.

Sanders and Cohen are represented by Kevin Mills and Jessica Kaye of Kaye & Mills; Plan B (Brad Pitt’s production company) and Foxx-King producing, with Jamie Foxx to star, and screenplay to be written by Matthew Carnahan (“The Kingdom” and “Lions for Lambs”). Arcade published the book.

Screenwriter Bennett Cohen believed he had stumbled on a forgotten but riveting true story, with the earmarks of a great film: In the early 1970s, San Francisco was gripped with fear, reeling from a wave of deadly attacks by black militants on white residents. Finally, two black officers helped crack the “Zebra Murders” case -- at the same time they were suing the police department for racial discrimination in hiring and promotion. At the height of the crime wave, police stopped virtually all black men who fit the killers’ profiles, a practice later ruled illegal. The attacks coincided with other traumatic local stories, including the Zodiac killings and the Patty Hearst case.

The deal

The players

The back story

But producers just rolled their eyes, saying the story was too explosive, too complicated for audiences (and development executives) to understand. So Cohen went to Plan B: “The only way to get traction was to tell the whole story, to write a book,” he said. “Once you’ve got a book, you’ve got gravitas, you have a document that’s out there.” After Cohen published a book with coauthor Earl Sanders (one of the two actual black cops), Hollywood changed its tune.

Jeremy Kleiner, an executive with Plan B production company, contacted the writers “out of the blue” after news of the forthcoming book was publicized in late 2005, and expressed strong interest in an option deal, said Mills. Eventually, DreamWorks came onboard, along with Carnahan and Foxx. “We found it to be a psychologically complex story about these two detectives already questioning their place in the world, when external circumstances took it to an extreme,” said Kira Goldberg, the DreamWorks executive who is overseeing the project.

josh.getlin@latimes.com