John McAfee’s crazy story coming to the big screen
You knew it was only a matter of time before the bizarre story of John McAfee’s flight from police officials in Belize was turned into a Hollywood film.
And, voila, just two months after the antivirus software mogul’s saga began, the rights to his story have been purchased by Warner Bros., according to a report in the Hollywood Reporter.
Specifically, Warner Bros. purchased the rights to “John McAfee’s Last Stand,” a story in Wired Magazine by Joshua Davis.
Davis will also serve as a producer on the film. John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, who wrote “Bad Santa” and “Crazy Stupid Love,” are slated to write the screenplay and direct.
Warner Bros. did not return a request for comment from The Times.
McAfee, 67, made a fortune in 1992 when the anti-virus company he founded went public. Two years later, he sold his stock for $100 million. But over the next 20 years, he lost millions of dollars in real estate investments and bad business ventures, and his fortune had dropped to $4 million.
He moved to Belize in 2008 and most of us didn’t think much about him until November of last year, when he went into hiding after becoming a “person of interest” in an investigation of the murder of his neighbor, Gregory Faull.
McAfee and Faull had recently argued over six noisy dogs that McAfee kept on his beachfront property.
After Faull was discovered by his housekeeper in a pool of blood, Belize officials went to McAfee’s home to question him, but couldn’t find him. That’s because McAfee had heard them coming and had buried himself in the sand with a cardboard box over his head, he told Wired’s Davis.
McAfee was convinced that the Belizean police wanted to kill him, Davis reported.
From there, things just got weirder. In a series of blog posts McAfee described how he used a series of elaborate disguises while he hid out near his home -- including darkening his skin with shoe polish and filling his cheeks with bubble gum to pose as a salesman hawking Guatemalan goods. Another time he bandaged his face and posed as a drunken German tourist.
He tried to find political asylum in Guatemala, but instead he was arrested by officials there for entering the country illegally. The arrest didn’t stick, and by mid-December, McAfee was holed up in a luxury hotel in Miami.
Do you think this sounds like the making of a good movie? Let us know in the comments.
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