Mitchell Kaplan: Last News

Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer “Go as a River,” the emotional and epic debut novel from author Shelley Read, has landed with content producers Fifth Season and Mazur Kaplan for a film adaptation. Fifth Season, formerly known as Endeavor Content, will produce the project alongside Paula Mazur and Mitchell Kaplan. Released in 2023, the book became an instant national bestseller and topped the Sunday Times list in the United Kingdom. Compared to American sagas like “The Four Winds” and “Where the Crawdads Sing,” the backdrop for Read’s work is the wild beauty of mid-century Colorado. The coming-of-age story follows a resilient young woman whose life is changed forever by one chance encounter. Inspired by true events surrounding the destruction of the town of Iola in the 1960s, “Go as a River” is not only a story of deeply held love in the face of hardship and loss, but of finding courage, friendship, and, finally, home―where least expected. 

Prologue At the start of the 1950s, in the suburbs of Elizabeth, N.J., a nearly teenage Judy Blume found herself at odds with the rhythms of her body. She hadn’t inherited her Aunt Gert’s large breasts. (“My mother worried terribly that I would take after my father’s sister, who had to have bras made to fit her,” says Judy, now 85. “I always say she worried them right off me!”) And she hadn’t yet started her period. (“I wanted it so desperately. But when I finally got it, I couldn’t tell anybody, because I had told them I had gotten it in the sixth grade!”)

Nellie Andreeva Co-Editor-in-Chief, TVEXCLUSIVE: SK Global and LA-based production and literary outfit The Mazur Kaplan Company have closed a first-look development deal, with an initial five books set for adaptation. The pact was jointly announced Tuesday by SK Global President of Television Marcy Ross, and Mazur Kaplan principals Paula Mazur and Mitchell Kaplan.