Doug Liman To Direct The Last Of The Tribe Adaptation

Chockstone Pictures has acquired the rights to Washington Post South American correspondent Monte Reel's non-fiction book The Last of the Tribe: The Epic Quest to Save a Lone Man in the Amazon, and have hired Doug Liman to direct. Mark Bailey is adapting the screenplay.

Liman is best known as the director of Swingers, The Bourne Identity, Mr. And Mrs. Smith and Jumper. The Last of the Tribe is about the search for the last surviving member of an Amazon tribe from the perspective of the government officials charged with finding him, and "preserving his way of life."

The story definitely sounds ripe for a Hollywood adaptation. I tend to prefer Liman's smaller films (Swingers, G0) to his big budget productions (Mr. And Mrs. Smith and Jumper) with The Bourne Identity being the perfect middle ground. This sounds like it might fall somewhere in the center as well.

Here is the official book description:

Throughout the centuries, the Amazon has yielded many of its secrets, but it still holds a few great mysteries. In 1996 experts got their first glimpse of one: a lone Indian, a tribe of one, hidden in the forests of southwestern Brazil. Previously uncontacted tribes are extremely rare, but a one-man tribe was unprecedented. And like all of the isolated tribes in the Amazonian frontier, he was in danger.Resentment of Indians can run high among settlers, and the consequences can be fatal. The discovery of the Indian prevented local ranchers from seizing his land, and led a small group of men who believed that he was the last of a murdered tribe to dedicate themselves to protecting him. These men worked for the government, overseeing indigenous interests in an odd job that was part Indiana Jones, part social worker, and were among the most experienced adventurers in the Amazon. They were a motley crew that included a rebel who spent more than a decade living with a tribe, a young man who left home to work in the forest at age fourteen, and an old-school sertanista with a collection of tall tales amassed over five decades of jungle exploration.

Their quest would prove far more difficult than any of them could imagine. Over the course of a decade, the struggle to save the Indian and his land would pit them against businessmen, politicians, and even the Indian himself, a man resolved to keep the outside world at bay at any cost. It would take them into the furthest reaches of the forest and to the halls of Brazil's Congress, threatening their jobs and even their lives. Ensuring the future of the Indian and his land would lead straight to the heart of the conflict over the Amazon itself.

A heart-pounding modern-day adventure set in one of the world's last truly wild places, The Last of the Tribe is a riveting, brilliantly told tale of encountering the unknown and the unfathomable, and the value of preserving it.

The 288-page hardcover book is available on Amazon for around $17. Associated Press says that "Monte Reel gets right to the heart of the dilemma facing modern-day Brazil as its rush to develop the vast Amazon rain forest rapidly collides with the last vestiges of cultures whose way of life has changed little since the Stone Age. The Last of the Tribe does an excellent job of placing the reader in the heart of the Amazon."