I’ve no idea whether there’s a book or film in the works based on this recent front page story in the Los Angeles Times, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were. It’s the story of Joe Sanderson, a Midwesterner and idealist who set off on a life of travel and adventure back in the mid-1960s and died in 1982 while fighting for leftist guerillas in El Salvador. Sanderson kept a diary that “lay neglected and unread for decades” and has been held by a guerilla vet from the war. The Times’ Héctor Tobar was apparently the first outsider to get his hands on it. 

Tobar’s story quotes liberally from the diary.

Among those who have made a comparison to “Into the Wild” was Roger Ebert, who knew Sanderson.

Writes Tobar:

The future film critic Roger Ebert lived on the same block and graduated with Sanderson in the Urbana High class of 1960. Ebert remembers Joe as a friend who collected butterflies and reptiles, and who left home with $100 bills his mother had sewn into his clothes. “From a nice little house surrounded by evergreens at the other end of Washington Street, he left to look for something he needed to find,” Ebert wrote in a 2007 review of the film “Into the Wild.” The movie, he told his readers, reminded him of a childhood friend with a similar story.

I have to think some Hollywood hit-makers reading Tobar’s story this week were reaching for their phones to strike a deal.

Related on World Hum:
* ‘Into the Wild’ McCandless Pilgrims Descending on Remote Bus
* World Hum Movie Club: ‘Into the Wild’
* Will ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ Spawn a New Magazine: Condé Nast Revolution?