Jason Bateman to Make Movie About Portlander Who Sold Stock in Himself

Back in 2008, Portlander Mike Merrill launched a novel project: The tech entrepreneur, then 30, sold shares of himself on the open market. Now his stunt will become a movie, directed by and starring Jason Bateman.

According to Deadline, Fox Searchlight announced that it's acquired a 2013 Wired magazine article about Merrill. "On January 26, 2008, a 30-year-old part-time entrepreneur named Mike Merrill decided to sell himself on the open market," the story began. "He divided himself into 100,000 shares and set an initial public offering price of $1 a share. Each share would earn a potential return on profits he made outside of his day job as a customer service rep at a small Portland, Oregon, software company. Over the next 10 days, 12 of his friends and acquaintances bought 929 shares, and Merrill ended up with a handful of extra cash. He kept the remaining 99.1 percent of himself but promised that his shares would be nonvoting: He'd let his new stockholders decide what he should do with his life."

The story went on to detail how Merrill's stockholders voted on various life decisions, such as whether he should invest in a Rwandan chicken farmer, become a vegetarian or attempt polyphasic sleeping—essentially, sleep less than four hours a day, in short bursts. They also voted on whether he should move in with his girlfriend (he did) or get a vasectomy (he didn't, but he did break up with the aforementioned girlfriend).

The movie, IPO Man, will be written by Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue, both writers for the Amazon show Transparent. No timeline has been set.

WWeek 2015