Inside Hollywood's SBF Mad Scramble

Apple paid $5M for Michael Lewis' book, a Nanette Burstein doc is underway, and a who'll-finish-first race is afoot as the crypto con projects pile up

SAM IN THE CAN FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried is currently awaiting trial, which starts on Oct. 2, from a jail cell in Brooklyn. (Photo illustration by Liz Welchman; see below for credits)

Michael Lewis’ next book, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon is scheduled to come out Oct. 3 — right around the time its subject, Sam Bankman-Fried, will be heading to U.S. District Court to stand trial for allegations of wire fraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, money laundering and related conspiracy charges. He is, of course, the former head of the cryptocurrency platform FTX that epically flamed out last year, wiping out almost $9 billion in unaccounted-for customer funds.

For an entertainment industry maybe, possibly, hopefully emerging from currently the second-longest work stoppage in its history around then, there’s a lot riding on the story of Bankman-Fried (also known by his initials, SBF). Could the sensational rise-and-fall narrative, parked in competing TV series and films around town, serve as a badly-needed get-your-engines-restarted defibrillator following the strike? Or will the crush of new projects around one man become an instant relic of a newly bygone era once characterized by pyrrhic Streaming Wars, copycat shows and unprecedented spending by a tiny pool of tech giants?

In total, there are at least eight reported Hollywood projects in the works so far on SBF — and in the last few days, I learned as well of a new one: