Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ on its way to becoming a movie

As chief operating officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg is a successful tech excutive. With her 2013 book “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will To Lead,” she became a bestselling author. Now she’s poised to play an important role in film, with news Friday that Sony has bought the rights to “Lean In.”

Deadline Hollywood reports that Sony made a preemptive bid for “Lean In” and brought in Nell Scovel, who wrote the book with Sandberg, to turn it into a film.

Sandberg has become a spokeswoman for the book, which our reviewer Rebecca Traister described as “naming and attempting to redress the double standards, entrenched attitudes and regressive catch-22s that drive women into ruts of self-doubt, lowered expectations and accommodating self-sacrifice.” Sandberg also founded the Lean In Foundation, a nonprofit focused on addressing those issues.

But the film isn’t going to be about her.

“The film is not a biography of Sandberg,” Deadline Hollywood writes. “Rather, Scovell will hatch a narrative film from the themes contained within the book.”

Scovell has quite a challenge: It’s not easy to craft a successful fictional tale from a nonfiction book about broad social issues. And what’s more, she has to do so while navigating one of the professions with a huge gender gap: Hollywood.

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