Example #1 LA Times

Here's an intersting piece in the LA Times on picking up a spy story for film adaptation. The intriguing aspect is that the literary property is authored by an actual agent, which means a large section of the book has been redacted. Here's what I'm talking about:

Hwy61 Films options 'An Ordinary Spy' by Joseph Weisberg The buyer: Paul Haggis and Michael Nozik

The back story

Your book-to-film mission, should you choose to accept it: a modern spy novel that doesn't tell the reader who the characters are, where the story takes place or even the kind of food they eat. All of these details are heavily redacted, marked by extensive blacked-out sections of type in the book, which switches back and forth in time. Some might put this one back on the shelf, but Haggis and Nozik jumped at the chance to turn Weisberg's highly praised yarn into a thinking person's spy film.

The author didn't delete all these facts as a writer's trick. As a former CIA officer, Weisberg would have been required to submit his novel to the agency, and he solved this literary dilemma by creatively censoring his own material. But that didn't make it any easier for the filmmakers. "We still haven't decided how to incorporate this aspect in the story, and obviously a picture tells a thousand words, so you're going to know where you are," Nozik said. "We're still plotting it out, but we think we've come up with an elegant solution to all these questions."

Haggis and Nozik are determined, moreover, to preserve the novel's distinct qualities. Weisberg, a devoted John le Carré fan, noted that his book -- unlike the master spy novelist's work -- is a down-to-earth look at daily life in the CIA.

So the source itself sounds like a perfect genre blueprint. A Spy novel in which agent ___ is stationed in ______ and has been there for ___ years. He gets a tip that foreign agent ____ might be ready to turn but can he trust his source, the mysterious ____. Or whatever -- the interesting aspect is that no matter what the answers to those blanks are, we'll have no idea whether they lend authenticity, or are as "made-up" as an Ian Fleming James Bond novel. But at the same time, isn't it a potentially great marketing ploy --
Based on a true story -- one that we'll never actually know!