Madonna’s Next Movie? Material Girl Picks Up Rights To ‘The Impossible Lives Of Greta Wells’

While Madonna has become a titan of the pop music world, and (at one point, anyway) successfully navigated an acting career, her attempts at directing haven’t quite hit the mark. Her debut was the scruffy “Filth & Wisdom,” which was followed up by 2011’s roundly derided fable “W.E.” But haters gonna hate, and it’s not the first time Madonna has faced criticism and it seems she may have another project on the horizon.

Author Andrew Sean Greer has revealed that Madonna has snapped up the rights to his book “The Impossible Lives Of Greta Wells,” though it’s not yet clear if she’ll just produce, or take on a bigger role in the production. “I got a phone call last week…I think it’s fine. No one’s asked me about this… from a celebrity who read the book and loved it so much she called me up personally to talk to me about it,” he told Litseen. “I thought it was going to be one of her assistants who was like, loved your book, she’s interested. Right. She didn’t read it. But oh no no no. She called me. She read it. She totally got it. There were a couple other people interested and they sort of all made a deal together, and she’s optioned the rights to it. We’ll see what happens. But it’s fun because it was Madonna.”

And it’s easy to see why Madonna might be curious about this one as movie material. Like “W.E.,” the story here is also split between a couple of a time periods, with another romance at its core. Here’s the synopsis from Amazon:

From the critically acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller The Confessions of Max Tivoli comes The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, a rapturously romantic story of a woman who finds herself transported to the “other lives” she might have lived.

After the death of her beloved twin brother and the abandonment of her long-time lover, Greta Wells undergoes electroshock therapy. Over the course of the treatment, Greta finds herself repeatedly sent to 1918, 1941, and back to the present. Whisked from the gas-lit streets and horse-drawn carriages of the West Village to a martini-fueled lunch at the Oak Room, in these other worlds, Greta finds her brother alive and well—though fearfully masking his true personality. And her former lover is now her devoted husband…but will he be unfaithful to her in this life as well? Greta Wells is fascinated by her alter egos: in 1941, she is a devoted mother; in 1918, she is a bohemian adulteress.

In this spellbinding novel by Andrew Sean Greer, each reality has its own losses, its own rewards; each extracts a different price. Which life will she choose as she wrestles with the unpredictability of love and the consequences of even her most carefully considered choices?

So consider it early days for this one — scripts still need to be written and financing to be found and all that fun stuff — but it looks like Madonna may still be eager to crack this directing thing. [Madonnarama via ONTD]