Run-A-Muck Adapting Pulitzer Finalist 'Stag Dance' for Film
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Run-A-Muck is developing a feature adaptation of Torrey Peters' novella "Stag Dance," with a search for a writer and director currently underway and Trevor Adley attached to produce.
- "Stag Dance" is the title novella from "Stag Dance: A Quartet," published by Penguin Random House and named a finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
- The story is set in an isolated illegal logging camp, where a winter dance sparks obsession, jealousy, desire, and betrayal centered on a towering axman named Babe Bunyan.
- Torrey Peters called Run-A-Muck's vision "blood-pumping, pulpy, thriller" in a statement to Deadline, contrasting it with what a "staid" Pulitzer-tied adaptation might look like.
- Co-founder Ilene Chaiken said the novella features "one of the most unforgettable characters I've ever encountered in fiction," anchoring Run-A-Muck's interest in the property.
- This is Run-A-Muck's second feature project, following "Courtside" — a WNBA-set romantic comedy starring Gabby Williams, Theresa Plaisance, and Syd Colson — with the company reporting more than 20 scripted and unscripted projects in development overall.
- Peters' prior novel "Detransition, Baby" won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and is being adapted separately by Tommy Dorfman's Good Girl Productions, which secured rights in 2025.
Why it matters: Run-A-Muck, launched by Pamela Drucker Mann, Ilene Chaiken, and Jennifer Beals, is using a Pulitzer finalist to anchor its second announced feature, signaling a slate strategy that pairs literary prestige with sports IP like its WNBA rom-com "Courtside." For Peters, a "pulpy" film vision rather than a literary-faithful one could push her trans-authored fiction toward wider genre audiences — but the search for a writer and director means no creative team is locked in yet.
Ask SkimNews
