Silk Road's webbed tale of drugs and 'murder' to become film Author Dennis Lehane is reportedly working on a script based on Silk Road. Crime novelist Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) will write a screenplay for a new film called Silk Road. According to the website Deadline, the script is based on an investigative article that is very much a work-in-progress. Silk Road takes its name from a controversial online encrypted marketplace, set up in 2011, that was used to sell illicit drugs. The site's alleged founder, Ross William Ulbricht, is currently facing charges of soliciting murder, drug trafficking, facilitating computer hacking, and money laundering. The Silk Road script will be based on a yet-to-be-published article by Joshua Davis which will appear on the new Epic website. The Epic site, set up by Davis and Joshuah Bearman, is designed to highlight, support and leverage long-form investigative journalism. At the moment, its content comes only from Davis and Bearman. Bearman wrote an article in 2007 for Wired magazine that was the starting point for Ben Affleck's film Argo, which told about the rescue of six US diplomats who were in hiding in Tehran in 1979 in the midst of the Iranian Revolution. It won an Academy Award for best picture this year. Silk Road's Ross William Ulbricht. According to Deadline, Epic has a two-year first-look deal with 20th-Century Fox to produce films based on articles by Bearman, Davis and other journalists. Another partner in Epic is Medium.com, a content platform established by a couple of the founders of Twitter. David Carr, in his New York Times article on the Epic enterprise, said that the Bearman and Davis had 18 articles optioned between them, with two more still under negotiation. He pointed out that Hollywood often options newspaper and magazine articles, but many projects do not find their way to the screen. The New Yorker, GQ and Vanity Fair are among the magazines whose articles have given rise to movies. As a just-launched online publisher, Epic is a new kind of player. According to Carr, Bearman "in his more optimistic - or grandiose moments - sees Epic as a journalistic version of the original United Artists," the studio formed in cinema's early years by directors and actors (Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffiths, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks) keen to control their own creative destinies.