STAR TREK II: WRATH OF KHAN Director Nicholas Meyer Developing Cold War Space Race TV Series

Primeridian Entertainment announced yesterday that the company’s principal Arcadiy Golubovich and partner Tim O’Hair will produce and finance a television project about the postwar rocket and space race between the United States and the USSR. The company has hired acclaimed screenwriter Nicholas Meyer (STAR TREK II: WRATH OF KHAN) to write the pilot and series treatment for the show, which will span from the collapse of Nazi Germany through the 1960s.

Primeridian has in conjunction optioned the rights to Matthew Brzezinski’s award-winning account of the early space race, Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age. Numerous well-known experts from both countries are in discussions to consult on the project, including Sergei Khrushchev, the son of the Soviet Premier who led the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, Nikita Khrushchev.

The untitled series will examine the tense competition between the US and USSR superpowers at the height of the Cold War, starting with the scramble to capture the remains of the Nazi V2 program. Looking well beyond NASA, the show will compare and contrast the successes, failures, and individuals on both sides, moving behind the scenes to the men who launched the first satellites and set the stage for the modern technological era into space.

“The series will recount the human-interest stories that we never fully learned in our classrooms,” said Meyer. “We hope audiences everywhere are looking forward to this thrilling tale of rivalries between the United States and Soviet Union and the race to control outer space.”

Meyer is an award-winning screenwriter, bestselling novelist and director. Lionsgate most recently greenlit his History Channel series based on his father Bernard C. Meyer’s Houdini: A Mind in Chains: a Psychoanalytic Portrait, with Adrien Brody to star.

His other most recent work includes an adaptation of Dan Simmons’ novel, The Crook Factory, for Johnny Depp, and The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning life of Robert Moses, for Oliver Stone and HBO.

In addition to WRATH OF KHAN, Meyer is well-known for THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION, his Sherlock Holmes take-off, which remained on the New York Times Bestseller list for forty weeks and won the British Gold Dagger award for crime fiction. Meyer adapted the novel for the big screen. The film, which starred Nicole Williamson, Robert Duvall, Alan Arkin, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave, earned him an Academy Award® nomination.