Warner Bros. producing CPR’s Glass’ O’Hare kids comedy adapted from “This American Life” shows

Ira Glass, creator and host of the ten-year-old nationally syndicated Chicago Public Radio hit “This American Life,” is developing a string of film projects, mostly adapted from the show.

First up is “Unaccompanied Minors” for Warner Bros. The O’Hare-set children’s comedy will be rewritten by Paul Feig (“Freaks and Geeks”), with an eye toward his directing. It could shoot as early as February.

ReelChicago talked with Glass the day after Warner’s announced “Unaccompanied Minors” on Nov. 7.

ReelChicago: How did the “Unaccompanied Minors” film project come about?
Glass: Two young filmmakers, Mya Stark and Jacob Meszaros, heard the segment on the show and contacted us. It wasn’t a story we thought of as having a film in it. We had been aggressively pitching lots of others stories. But they had a vision that it could be a kids’ comedy. What’s being made is exactly the thing that they’d imagined.

ReelChicago: What was the original radio story?
Glass: Susan Burton talks about this night that she spent in O’Hare as a little kid at Christmas. The whole airport was filled with kids of divorced parents, like her and her sister. She describes how they all get snowed in and are corralled into this room.