Shadow Divers finally surfacing?

DHD broke the story – Robert Schwentke (RED) is circling Fox 2000’s adaptation of Shadow Divers, a project that has been languishing in development for years. Based on the acclaimed book by Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers follows two wreck divers who uncover the hull of a German U-boat off the New Jersey coast in 1991. The divers became obsessed with discovering the truth behind the ship and the men who died inside it.

Book Jacket:

In the tradition of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm comes a true tale of riveting adventure in which two weekend scuba divers risk everything to solve a great historical mystery–and make history themselves.

For John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, deep wreck diving was more than a sport. Testing themselves against treacherous currents, braving depths that induced hallucinatory effects, navigating through wreckage as perilous as a minefield, they pushed themselves to their limits and beyond, brushing against death more than once in the rusting hulks of sunken ships.

But in the fall of 1991, not even these courageous divers were prepared for what they found 230 feet below the surface, in the frigid Atlantic waters sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey: a World War II German U-boat, its ruined interior a macabre wasteland of twisted metal, tangled wires, and human bones–all buried under decades of accumulated sediment.

No identifying marks were visible on the submarine or the few artifacts brought to the surface. No historian, expert, or government had a clue as to which U-boat the men had found. In fact, the official records all agreed that there simply could not be a sunken U-boat and crew at that location.

Over the next six years, an elite team of divers embarked on a quest to solve the mystery. Some of them would not live to see its end. Chatterton and Kohler, at first bitter rivals, would be drawn into a friendship that deepened to an almost mystical sense of brotherhood with each other and with the drowned U-boat sailors–former enemies of their country. As the men’s marriages frayed under the pressure of a shared obsession, their dives grew more daring, and each realized that he was hunting more than the identities of a lost U-boat and its nameless crew.

Author Robert Kurson’s account of this quest is at once thrilling and emotionally complex, and it is written with a vivid sense of what divers actually experience when they meet the dangers of the ocean’s underworld. The story of Shadow Divers often seems too amazing to be true, but it all happened, two hundred thirty feet down, in the deep blue sea

You can read an excerpt here.

Critics say:

While Kurson doesn’t stint on technical detail, lovers of any sort of adventure tale will certainly absorb the author’s excellent characterizations, and particularly his balance in describing the combat arm of the Third Reich. Felicitous cooperation between author and subject rings through every page of this rare insightful action narrative. If the publishers are dreaming of another Perfect Storm, they may get their wish.

– Publishers Weekly

In the seven years between its discovery and its positive identification, U-869 claimed the lives of three experienced wreck divers and scared away many more. Though Kurson’s historical narrative is compelling on its own, it is nearly overshadowed by his adventure story–two brave and driven men chased by deep-water divers’ narcosis, decompression sickness, sharks, and an entire wrecked sub full of snags to ensnare divers until their tanks run out. It’s also a fascinating look at the sometimes communal, sometimes bitterly competitive psychology of wreck-divers, weekend warriors in wet suits whose dangerous hobby is often an antidote to the frustrations of the workaday world. All of these elements–military history, mystery, action tale, ethnography–combine to make this book very hard to put down.

– Booklist