Paramount Pictures has optioned the rights to the Atlantic article “The Wedding Sting,” with Mary Parent on board to produce.

The bidding was quite competitive, with studios including Universal in the hunt; however, Paramount came in with the best offer.

Written by Jeff Maysh, the article tells the tale of how the police department in Flint, Mich., devised a plan in 1990 to create a fake wedding in order to lure all the local drug dealers to one party.

Flint was going through a depression as thousands of people were laid off and forced to leave the community following the closing of several General Motors auto plants. Drug dealers from all over the state found the town to be a haven to peddle every drug possible, leading to Flint being labeled as “one of the worst cities in America to live in” in 1987 by Money magazine.

With the department lacking funds to round up all the suspected dealers in town, it decided to organize a fake wedding, invite the suspects, and arrest them. The case became so legendary that law enforcement agencies all over the world began using it as a tool to teach future undercover agents how to practice successful drug stings.

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Maysh has quickly become one of the more popular writers among studio execs, with several of his articles currently in development. He recently optioned his Victory Journal article “The Legend of the Panther Girl” to Channing Tatum and Reid Carolin’s 33 and Out production company, and sold his article “The Man Who Got America High” to Fox Searchlight.

Parent most recently produced “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water,” which grossed $311 million worldwide, and is producing Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “The Revenant,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and Paramount’s “Monster Trucks.”

Maysh is repped by Joel Gotler at IPG.

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