THR is reporting that Michael Keaton and Michael Oates Palmer are on board, as producers, for SKINNY DIP, an HBO project based on the Carl Hiaasen novel of the same name.
Chaz Perrone might be the only marine scientist in the world who doesn’t know which way the Gulf Stream runs. He might also be the only one who went into biology just to make a killing, and now he’s found a way doctoring water samples so that a ruthless agribusiness tycoon can continue illegally dumping fertilizer into the endangered Everglades. When Chaz suspects that his wife, Joey, has figured out his scam, he pushes her overboard from a cruise liner into the night-dark Atlantic. Unfortunately for Chaz, his wife doesn’t die in the fall.

Clinging blindly to a bale of Jamaican pot, Joey Perrone is plucked from the ocean by former cop and current loner Mick Stranahan. Instead of rushing to the police and reporting her husband’s crime, Joey decides to stay dead and (with Mick’s help) screw with Chaz until he screws himself. As Joey haunts and taunts her homicidal husband, as Chaz’s cold-blooded cohorts in pollution grow uneasy about his ineptitude and increasingly erratic behavior, as Mick Stranahan discovers that six failed marriages and years of island solitude haven’t killed the reckless romantic in him, we’re taken on a hilarious, full-throttle, pure Hiaasen ride through the warped politics and mayhem of the human environment, and the human heart.
Do I need to talk about Keaton? He was Beetlejuice and Batman. He made his starring debut in Ron Howard’s awesome NIGHT SHIFT with Henry Winkler. Michael Oates Palmer has a history in television. He worked on AMC’s RUBICON as well as the remake of CUPID and did some writing for season four of THE WEST WING.
Carl’s writings have made it to the big screen in the stinky STRIP TEASE, a turkey that paid Demi Moore enough money to cover all of her plastic surgery. Will this be different? I don’t think it comes down to who produces, this is fly or sink based on who adapts it.