The Most Dangerous Man in America (Twelve, 2018), written by Texas authors Steven L. Davis and Bill Minutaglio, is heading to TV screens near you. Allan Mandelbaum of Hollywood-based Star Thrower Entertainment, the same folks who produced Steven Spielberg’s 2017 blockbuster The Post, is an executive producer. “What really excited us about this one was that it wasn’t just about Timothy Leary, like, doing a bunch of acid,” said Mandelbaum.
Woody Harrelson is set to star. Luke Davies is writing the screenplay.
According to Dan Singer, writing for the Dallas Morning News, no deal has been struck with a media platform yet, but the producers — whose past work also includes the 2017 film Ingrid Goes West starring Aubrey Plaza, as well as Wind River, released the same year with Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen — envision the series landing on an online streaming service or premium cable network upon its release.
The book on which the series will be based is a look at Timothy Leary, the fired Harvard psychologist who became a star of ’60s counterculture and a passionate promoter of the psychedelic substances that fueled it.
Concentrating on the early ’70s, Davis and Minutaglio offer a kind of travelogue that follows Leary’s time on the run from the authorities with “present-tense immediacy.” It’s set against a backdrop of historical change; the vibrations left over from the Summer of Love are waning, giving way to the harsher social climate of the 1970s. President Nixon labels Leary with the epithet immortalized in the title of the book: “the most dangerous man in America.”
“Very few people, I think, are familiar with this specific episode in Timothy Leary’s life,” said Mandelbaum, the producer. He certainly wasn’t. “When I first read the book,” he said, “I was Googling it and fact-checking to make sure that it actually happened because it almost reads like fiction.”
When it came out at the beginning of 2018, The Most Dangerous Man in America was a surprise departure from the Texas-themed works of nonfiction for which both its authors are known. Their first book together, Dallas 1963, came out in 2013 and covered the political atmosphere in Dallas leading up to the Kennedy assassination.
Beyond their book work, both writers have been active in Texas’s broader literary scene for decades. Davis is the former president of the Texas Institute of Letters and longtime curator at the Wittliff Collections, the premiere collection of Southwestern cultural works at Texas State University. And Minutaglio, a longtime Texas newspaper and magazine writer, spent almost twenty years at the Dallas Morning News. He retired from teaching journalism at the University of Texas last year.
