The $33 million-earned comedian has been reported to make the big bucks from his films Meet the Parents, Night at the Museum and the animated film Madagascar, which was a box office hit with $1.6 billion.
Gareth Cattermole/Getty ImagesBen Stiller is bringing his life to the small screen.
The actor-writer-produce, through his Red Hour Films, has Please Knock, a single-camera comedy loosely based on his life to ABC.
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Kevin Napier — who wrote Stiller’s 2009 Fox drama pilot The Station, is on board to write the script and executive produce alongside Red Hour’s Stuart Cornfeld, Debbie Liebling and Stiller.
The project hails from ABC Studios, where Stiller and his Red Hour inked an overall development pact in November. Universal Pictures’ Liebling, who produced Stiller’s Tower Heist, was brought in at the time to oversee Red Hour’s new television shingle at the time.
Loosely based on Stiller’s life, Please Knock revolves around Mitch Fuller, an A-list actor who realizes he’s losing touch with reality and his family who moves back to the same New York building he grew up in — where his parents still reside.
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For Stiller, the project marks his latest foray into television — the medium where he started his career on MTV/Fox’s sketch effort The Ben Stiller Show. Stiller and Jonathan Safran Foer have family comedy All Talk set up at HBO with the multihyphenate attached to star.
The Stiller project marks the latest in semi-autobiographical comedies to sell this development season, with Community‘s Donald Glover‘s untitled effort set up at NBC, Justin Halpern‘s I Suck at Girls (from his memoir) at Fox and Adam F. Goldberg‘s How the F— am I Normal? in the works at ABC.
Stiller is repped by WME and Gang Tyre.
Email: Lesley.Goldberg@thr.com; Twitter: @Snoodit
