Film Rights To Geeta Anand’s Book Were Sold Even Before It Was Written!
Ms Geeta Anand
Journalism affords an opportunity to its practitioners to engage with history as it is happening in the most intimate way. There is no better way to meet the people who are the closest participants in the biggest tragedies, victories and challenges of our time. This view was expressed at the last meeting by Ms Geeta Anand, foreign correspondent of the Wall Street Journal in India, who says she has the best job she can imagine because she can develop her understanding of the world and create powerful stories that transform the hearts and minds of readers.
Ms Anand, who was introduced by Christopher Bluemel, first spoke of her work in the US. In 2002, the year of corruption scandals (Enron and WorldCom), she helped write a series of articles on corporate corruption, as a result of which, the Wall Street Journal went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism. One of these articles involved ImClone, which had Martha Stewart as an investor; she was accused of having insider information from CEO Sam Waksal and selling her stock on learning that the company’s experimental medicine had not done well in clinical trials. Her piece was part of the overall prize-winning story. She had got a lead at a conference in Bermuda while talking to doctors and scientists about Waksal, his failed experiments and academic papers. They spoke of their experience with him at top academic and medical institutions such as Stanford, the National Cancer Institute, Tufts and Mount Sinai Hospital.
After speaking to the people who had worked with Waksal, she wrote a story with names, dates and places, describing his history in top academic medical institutions and how they had inadvertently conspired and allowed him to become a man of great respect by pushing him out when it became clear that he was doing questionable things, but not informing the next institution about it. “The article showed how far you can get if you have a lot of time and are very intelligent (and he was both) even in a country with some of the most responsible institutions with checks and balances. A few years later, I got a letter from Sam Waksal from jail saying that the drug his company had developed was going to be approved and I should write that he had helped develop it and he had been right all along.”
Mr. Waksal was indeed right. Most people failed to recognise when writing about those who make huge mistakes that you can break corporate regulations and engage in insider trading, but you can also be someone who developed a life-saving medicine, and both can happen at the same time. “There was a lesson for me – to not quickly write off everything that people do because they have done something terrible in one aspect of their life. I think it is important to recognise this because if you don’t, you can sometimes miss the true picture and the true value of what someone’s doing.”
Ms Anand then turned to her book The Cure which was made into the movie Extraordinary Measures with Harrison Ford and Brendan Fraser. It was about John Crowley, the CEO of Novozymes, who was developing a medicine for a rare genetic disorder, Pompe’s Disease. He had two children with the disease which was untreatable and fatal in the first two years of life. She went to meet the family and saw the children, aged one and three, with tubes coming out of their necks and connected to ventilators next to the sofa. John talked about their diagnosis and being told that he should enjoy the few months that he had with them. “Just hearing him talk about it was a devastating experience. It was one of the very few times when I had to struggle not to cry while interviewing someone.” But he was energetic and passionate about finding a treatment. It normally takes years to develop medicines but he would do it faster, in record time. He had raised $30 million and founded a company to do research; and nothing was going to stop him.
She spent months and years talking to John – about his firm running out of money, selling it to one of the biggest biotech firms, Genzyme, getting his investors to agree to sell, and then convincing Genzyme to make him the head of the search for a cure for his children. But Genzyme wanted to design the best clinical trial for the drug and refused to allow his children in it because they were too old. He was devastated. Behind the company’s back, he tried to develop a trial just for his children. But the company found out and stopped it. He had to resign but was allowed to design a trial for his children at a small hospital. His children got the drug in the trial two years later. It saved their lives but didn’t cure them. They would have died of heart failure, but the drug had helped shrink their heart to normal size. But it wasn’t able to get into their skeletal muscle cells, so it couldn’t restore the muscle strength they had lost. “They have lived and continue to go to school in wheelchairs, on ventilators. But that’s the only life they know. They and their parents have found a way to accept this and to be happy about it.” She wanted to write the story because it was a powerful human tale reflecting the message of sages from all religions and of all philosophies, about the importance of attitude; “if your attitude is right, you can be happy even when facing the most profound disabilities.” Before she wrote the book, an agent had contacted Harrison Ford. The film rights were sold even before the book was written.
But Ford opted out because he was overage; so Brendan Fraser was signed to play John and he played the scientist. During the filming, her family was invited to the movie set and had an interesting encounter with the stars. (See Page 1). Ms Anand then talked about her reporting in India. Among the stories she had done were the terrorist attacks of 26/11; the efforts of Dr. Zarir Udwadia to treat totally drug-resistant tuberculosis; and the land deals of Robert Vadra. She travelled extensively and followed up the stories relentlessly. The experiences she gathered had been humbling, especially with Dr. Zarir Udwadia, arguably the best TB doctor in the country, whose experimental regimen had helped cure a penurious Rahima Shaikh of TB – but it had not cured her of her poverty.
“That’s been one of the lessons I have learnt in India – how hard it is to make life liveable, to help people to get even the most basic things; that it is easier to be cured of incurable TB than to be pulled out of poverty in a single generation.” As for Robert Vadra, her investigative report based on data culled from the land records office in Bikaner in Rajasthan was quoted by Mr. Narendra Modi, who was then running for Prime Minister. He said Wall Street Journal had written that “Robert Vadra made Rs. 300 crores from Rs. 1 lakh. Yeh RSVP model of development hai – Rahul, Sonia, Vadra, Priyanka!”