DreamWorks has hired Susannah Grant to adapt a series of Los Angeles Times columns by reporter Steve Lopez about a homeless musician with schizophrenia who dreams of playing at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Tentatively titled "Imagining Beethoven," the 12-part series profiling Nathaniel Anthony Ayers was published during the course of eight months in Lopez's Points West column last year.

Lopez's humanistic account of Ayers follows the former Julliard student's bout with mental illness as he wanders Los Angeles' Skid Row with a beat up violin and hears the city's sounds as if it were an orchestra.

During the course of the series -- with the help and friendship of Lopez, assistance from city support services and an outgoing member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic -- Ayers moves into an apartment, is offered private cello lessons and reconnects with his family on the East Coast.

Producer Gary Foster approached DreamWorks with the story. The studio brought in Grant to adapt. DreamWorks' Mark Sourian is overseeing the biopic for the studio, which optioned all rights, including Lopez's and Ayers' life rights and rights to Lopez's forthcoming book about Skid Row and Ayers. Gary Foster and Russ Krasnoff are producing DreamWorks' "Imagining Beethoven" through their Krasnoff Foster Entertainment.

Grant will make her directorial debut early next year with Columbia Pictures' "Catch and Release," based on a script she wrote, starring Jennifer Garner. She also penned "Charlotte's Web," "In Her Shoes" and "Erin Brockovich."

Lopez joined the Times in May 2001, after four years at Time Inc., where he wrote for Time, Sports Illustrated, Life and Entertainment Weekly as editor-at-large.

Lopez has won a Society of Professional Journalists Award, the H.L. Mencken Writing Award, the Ernie Pyle Award for human-interest writing and a National Headliner Award for column writing.

He is the author of three novels: "Third and Indiana," "The Sunday Macaroni Club" and "In the Clear."

Grant is repped by CAA.