When I first read the story of John McAfee, you could practically see the movie in your head. It’s too insane of a story for Hollywood to pass up. McAfee was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who made a fortune, became very paranoid, fled to the jungle, became heavily armed, and may have killed somebody.
As Variety tells us, McAfee was a programmer for NASA, and he also developed the first anti virus program, which is still named the McAfee anti-virus. McAfee’s company, McAfee Associated, was acquired by Intel for $7.68 billion, but McAfee sold his stock long before that sale, and according to the Hollywood Reporter he was worth $100 million.
Recently authorities in Belize would like to question him about the murder of his neighbor, and he had also been arrested for “unlicensed drug manufacturing,” the drug in question being meth. When the police stormed his jungle compound, and McAfee was found naked, clutching a revolver, he balked at being arrested for making meth, telling the cops, “I haven’t sold drugs since 1983.”
McAfee’s story made a wild article in Wired, which was optioned by Warner Brothers, and now as Deadline tells us, the screenwriting duo of Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander will be adapting this insane story for the big screen. Larry and Scott are best known for doing wild biopics, namely Ed Wood, The People Vs. Larry Flynt, and Man on the Moon (Andy Kaufman). They also adapted Stephen King’s 1408, and they also recently did an adaptation of the OJ Simpson case tome, The Run of His Life, which is in the works for Fox as a mini-series.
This kind of material is absolutely up Larry and Scott’s alley, and why wait for the Steve Jobs biopic when you can see a movie about a lunatic who went nuts, fled to the jungle, and became an insane outlaw of the software world? Sounds more like my kind of movie.
