Nellie Bly is the new Lara Croft

Well, contrary to what the New York Times forecasted a while back, the sky might not be totally falling for journalists on film. Variety reports today that screenwriter Sean Hood is penning the script for Nellie Bly, a biopic about the famed investigative reporter's account of life inside New York's infamous Blackwell's Island women's asylum.

As a proud j-school dork, this development pleases me to virtually no end; you cannot really overstate Bly's influence on journalism since she led the ranks of publisher Joseph Pulitzer's New York World "stunt girls" in the 1880s. And it looks like producer Sobini Films got the right guy for the job—I guess:

"I'm in love with Nellie Bly, her reckless spirit and indomitable charisma," Hood said. "The stunt she pulled off and the horrors she uncovered are so unimaginable that we'd never get away with telling the story if it weren't completely true."

Yeah, well, as long as we are fetishizing women journalists, I call dibs on writing the Marguerite Higgins film. But even Bly's trailblazing dispatches from the eastern front during World War I predate Higgins' reports from Inchon by nearly 30 years, and only Bly had the odd fortune of being assigned to travel around the world in fewer than 80 days (she made it in 72) and the audacity to feign insanity to get the inside scoop at Blackwell's Island (not-too-sensationally titled "10 Days in a Mad House"). She put her male colleagues to shame on a semi-regular basis.

Which raises the question: Where do you stop when you are telling Nellie Bly's story? Why not just start a Bly franchise like Lara Croft's? Think of the merchandising tie-ins—Bly action figures, Happy Meals (oh wait—that's DreamWorks), video games, etc. The sky is the limit, and the Times will feel so much better and probably get at least three more essays out of it. And maybe a movie deal out of Judy Miller's incarceration.

But in a related note for those of you to whom journalism icons are not quite as arousing, you always have dope. That is, Sara Gran's Dope, which Paramount bought Monday and tells the story of a recovered junkie who works to track down a missing Barnard student lost in 1950s NYC drug culture. Ah, yes, those crazy, smack-addled Barnard girls—always getting into trouble.