Fox Searchlight has launched development of a biopic about Scotty Bowers in the wake of the release of Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary “Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood.”


The biopic is set up with Tyrnauer and his producing partner Corey Reeser of Altimeter Films. No director or writer is yet attached.


The documentary premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and was released on July 27 by Greenwich Entertainment at a single theater, then expanded to 10 sites last weekend with domestic grosses of $83,196. “Scotty” follows Bowers, a World War II Marine combat veteran who fought at the Battle of Iwo Jima and became a legendary bisexual male hustler and all-purpose date-arranger for Hollywood movie stars from the 1940s until the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.


Peter Debruge said in his review, “No one tells stories like Scotty Bowers. Dishy, sordid, and deliciously off-color, his firsthand accounts reveal a different side of the Dream Factory from the one that studios so carefully manufactured in their heyday, with Bowers at the epicenter as a kind of benevolent matchmaker.”


Bowers came to Hollywood’s attention in 2012 with his tell-all biography “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars,” containing extensive claims about the sex lives of many people in the Hollywood movie industry including during that period. He had not discussed the information prior to publication but decided to do so because most of the people involved were dead.


Bowers turned 95 in July.