Renée Zellweger has acquired the rights to socialite Brantly Martin's novel Pillage. Zellweger will produce the film in conjunction with PalmStar Entertainment.

Based on the novel by Martin, a New York nightlife fixture, the story centers on four best friends living in NYC who add excitement to their dead-end lives by searching for the perfect party in the downtown nightlife scene. Though the characters may be based on real life people and events, the book is classified as fiction.  John Krokidas, who wrote the screenplay, will direct.

Here's the book description from Amazon:

The love child of Charles Bukowski and Bret Easton Ellis, Brantly Martin provides a brutal yet hilarious look at the lives of Manhattan's downtown elite at the dawn of the new millennium in Pillage, his first novel.

Detailing the decadent descent of Cracula and his crew, Martin lures us into the shadowy ambiguities of addiction--a world where desire meets destruction and the perversity of this pathos is often laughable. Be it urban wildebeest Aeronymous, the wigga with a taste for BAPE sweaters and iced coffees; the Fireman, the overgrown adolescent who knows the quickest way to your ex-girlfriend's bed; or the Reverend, who rejected the sins of his brothers to save the Africans from themselves, the entitled creatures of this novel plunder what remains of a once-vibrant culture and reap the spoils of our languorous generation.

Between eight balls of cocaine and pints of Patrón, Cracula fluctuates between reality and fantasy, hyper-aware of the façades, formulas, and falsehoods that encircle his existence, but unable to gain an advantage. Pillage reveals the inherent hypocrisy of America's social and economic achievements, as they are made manifest in the city that never sleeps, slyly implying that triumph is a trap in itself--and the only way out? Just ask Kurt Cobain...

This film seems to go along with PalmStar's current roster of projects which includes LUNAR PARK, based on the Bret Easton Ellis novel and to be directed by Phil Alden Robinson; and THE GOLDEN SUICIDES, based on the Vanity Fair article about the suicides of NYC artists Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan.

Shooting is scheduled to start during the first half of 2011 in New York City.

Source: Variety