J.J. Abrams to produce 'Mystery on Fifth Avenue' movie
Paramount has purchased a New York Times article, "Mystery on Fifth Avenue," for a feature that J.J. Abrams will produce through his Bad Robot shingle. Writers Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky have been hired to adapt it into a film, with Marc Evans overseeing for the studio.
The Times feature, which ran Thursday and was written by reporter Penelope Green, describes an Upper East Side luxury apartment on Fifth Avenue that the occupants had redesigned to include hidden compartments, messages, puzzles, poems, codes and games for their four preteen kids.
The article the movie will be based on.
The architectural designer Eric Clough embedded 18 clues in the Fifth Avenue apartment of the Klinsky- Sherry family, leading them on a scavenger hunt through the rooms of their home.
The hunt involved ciphers, riddles, poems and custom-built furniture with hidden drawers and panels. A book with a narrative about a mystery, hidden behind paneling in the front hall, offered clues.
A rectangular panel in the den and guest room opens to reveal acrylic slices, far left, that fit together to form a cube. When the chamfered magnetic cube lodged above the slices is dragged over the 24 panels on a nearby wall, they open.
Decorative leather molding stamped with letters in a hallway can be popped out and wrapped around a rod removed from the foot of Ms. Sherry and Mr. Klinsky’s bed so that the letters on the coiled leather spell out a clue.
Behind a drawing of a plane that hangs in a hallway is a little niche containing a scale model of the kitchen, a clue that leads to a musical score written for the apartment, which is hidden in a drawer above the stove.
Millwork panels in a hallway were designed to look like Le Corbusier’s Modular Man and da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Puzzle pieces hidden in one fit together to make a key that opens the other.
In assembling talents for his project, Mr. Clough aimed high. His first choice for the author of the book that contains clues to the scavenger hunt in addition to the mystery story, was Jonathan Safran Foer, whose work contains its own sort of coded narrative pyrotechnics. Mr. Clough sent him a puzzle cube similar to this one, stamped with his firm’s phone number and the word “Please.”
Photographs of the apartment’s original interiors have secret writing on the back that reveals the number of salamanders in the apartment. The salamander is a motif that is part of the puzzle and appears throughout the apartment.
Door knockers on opposite walls of a hallway initially seemed pointless. They can be removed and joined to create a crank that opens hidden panels in the dining room sideboard.
The custom-made sideboard has hidden panels on either side that can be cranked open to display keys and keyholes.
When the correct keys are used, hidden drawers are revealed.
The drawers contained acrylic letters and a table-size cloth imprinted with the beginnings of a crossword puzzle. The answers to the crossword puzzle led to the panels in the guest room, behind which were the words of the poem.
The children’s bedrooms have radiator covers with poems written specifically for each child cut into them in code. The Caesar Shift cipher in the bedroom of the oldest child, Cavan, was broken by a friend.
I read this article the other day, it's SO COOL, and completely ridiculous. I wish my apartment had secret puzzles.
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