Issa Rae, David Heyman To Produce Netflix Film On Tanya Smith’s Memoir ‘Ghost In The Machine’

Deadline is reporting that Netflix has landed the rights to Tanya Smith’s upcoming memoir, The Ghost in the Machine, and will adapt into a feature film with Issa Rae and David Heyman producing. Rae will produce through her Issa Rae Productions while Heyman will produce his Heyday Films. Smith will exec produce.

The memoir tells Smith’s unbelievable story— of how a middle-class black girl from the North Side of Minneapolis would, in the words of the FBI, “become one of the single biggest threats to the entire United States banking system.” The film will follow her extraordinary story of creating a sophisticated wire fraud scheme and outwitting the FBI and prosecutors, who underestimated her intelligence for years, before her life ultimately fell apart, leading to two prison escapes and finally serving 13 years of a 24-year sentence – at the time, the longest sentence handed down to any white-collar criminal.

Smith’s book, which was pre-empted by Little A/Amazon and will be published in 2021, will chronicle her rise and fall and share how she finally came to terms with her past and rebuilt her life. Montrel McKay and Sara Rastogi are overseeing on behalf of Issa Rae Productions and Jillian Share and Jeffrey Clifford are overseeing on behalf of Heyday Films.