EXCLUSIVE: Warner Bros has optioned the bestselling 1966 Ross MacDonald crime novel Black Money for Joel and Ethan Coen to write and potentially direct. The film will be produced by Joel Silver, who also will co-finance with Warner Bros via Silver Pictures Entertainment. Steve White will be executive producer. The novel focuses on MacDonald’s private eye protagonist Lew Archer. Hired by a spurned lover to expose the suave Frenchman who has run off with his client’s girlfriend, Archer follows a trail that leads to a deep conspiracy as the mysterious paramour is connected to a seven-year-old suicide and a ton of gambling debts.

MacDonald died in 1983, and this is one of the prolific writer’s most famed novels.

Warner Bros’ Creative Development and Worldwide Production president Greg Silverman spearheaded this for the studio, and it’s as intriguing a match between auteurs and a beloved book, as was Paul Thomas Anderson when…