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SALT LAKE CITY -- Director Ron Howard may take on a project sure to be controversial in Utah.
The Deseret News reports Warner Bros. is asking Howard, who has made blockbuster films including "The Da Vinci Code," to direct a film based on the book "Under the Banner of Heaven," by Jon Krakauer.
The paper says the studio is still negotiating for rights to the book, which is about the Lafferty brothers -- Mormon fundamentalists who murdered their sister-in-law Brenda Lafferty and her baby Erica in 1984. The book focuses on violence in off-shoot groups of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The book got mixed reviews. Anne Rule of the Washington Post called it, "a tour de force that must be read carefully and savored." Yet it was criticized by others, including the New York Times, for not showing "religion's upside."
Mike Otterson, director of Media Relations for the LDS church, said in a 2003 statement, "This book is not history, and Krakauer is no historian."
"He does a huge disservice to his readers by promulgating old stereotypes. He finds sufficient zealots and extremists in the past 150 years to help him tell his story, and by extrapolation tars every Mormon with the same brush," Otterson wrote.
A report in the news organization The Wrap says the movie studio is also asking Dustin Black to write the script. He is an ex-Mormon who writes for the HBO show "Big Love."
Written with contributions from Randall Jeppesen.
