Hooray: Starz gets my memoir Insatiable for TV series

      Variety is reporting this morning that Starz is hungry to showcase my memoir Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess into a possible one hour cable series. Since Starz is headed by Chris Albrecht, the man behind HBO’s extraordinary series success, I am flying.

         Starz has teamed with Robert Lantos’ Serendipity Point Films and Rob Lee’s Bayonne Entertainment to develop my adventures into a series focusing on the social, cultural, culinary and sexual revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s – a time in New York when everything was new and anything was possible, when young American chefs started making news and Plato’s Retreat was a block from my apartment in the cellar of the Ansonia. 

         Today in this food-obsessed moment with untold thousands of bloggers forking away, it is difficult to imagine what power restaurants critics and New York magazine had in those decades. And what fun.

         Well, when you pitch your ideas to a trio of smart and sensual media executives at Le Bernardin over Eric Ripert’s delicate escolar and sea urchin risotto, you can’t lose. Working with Albrecht and Lantos on this project is like dancing with Fred Astaire and having the great Swiss chef Fredy Girardet cook your dinner.

         Filmmaker Lantos, whose recent credits include the Academy Award-nominated Eastern Promises, tells me he has been a fan of my food writing for years. Variety quotes him as saying “Greene’s had a seminal influence on my senses as well as my corpulence.”  It was love at first sight for me and Lee after I listened to him quote line after line from Insatiable. 

        Lantos and Lee, a former producing partner of Albrecht’s, will exec produce the project. Serendipity’s Ari Lantos and Mark Musselman will produce.  I expect to be their guide to the New York I knew.

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