Paramount prepares autism bestseller for the silver screen

CAIRO – 22 June 2017: Paramount collaborates with Lorne Michaels, the producer of “Saturday Night Live” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” to bring a bestseller about autism to screen. The narrative, however, is definitely far from Michaels’ rich career in comedy.

“Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity” was authored by Steve Silberman. The book won the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, now known as the Baillie Gifford Prize, when it was released in 2015.

The story started in 2001 when Silberman, a journalist who wrote about science, technology and digital industry, was conducting interviews with innovators in Silicon Valley, California.

Silberman noticed the popularity of diagnoses with autism and Asperger’s syndrome in the region. So, he wrote the Geek Syndrome, an article which WIRED magazine published. But he did not stop at that article.

More than 10 years later, “Neurotribes” came out and it became a New York Times bestselling book. It recounted the history of autism, the story of Hans Asperger (one of the most prominent researchers in the field) and even proposed an acceptance model for society to follow.

The book which the Guardian described as “a gripping narrative written with journalistic verve” will be adapted to the silver screen by Matt Rager who has adapted works by William Faulkner and John Steinbeck.

In the U.S., the Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced that about one in 68 children gets diagnosed with autism. Last year, Dahlia Soliman, the president of the Egyptian Autistic Society told Ahram Online that even though Egypt has no specific statistics on the prevalence of the disorder, almost one in every 250 children is autistic.

Link to “The Geek Syndrome”:

https://www.wired.com/2001/12/aspergers/