As Mike Sager tells it, the letter arrived 18 months ago, written by Janet Cooke in her choolteacher hand. The proposal: that he, as her former boyfriend and Washington Post colleague, tell her story at last.

Before the 12,000-word piece even surfaced in the June issue of GQ, Hollywood jumped in head-first. In a May 16 bidding war, TriStar Pictures committed a whopping $1.6 million for the movie rights, payable in full when principal photography begins. That Cooke, whose 1981 Pulitzer Prize-winning story proved to be a hoax, is sharing in the windfall added to the buzz.

For 15 years, Cooke had been sidestepping a press obsessed with the details of her demise. What led her to fabricate a story about Jimmy, the 8-year-old heroin addict? And what became of her after the award was returned? Only by confronting these questions, she realized, could she get her life and career back on track.

"[I wanted] to create a forum in which to confess my sins, to explain myself, to ask for forgiveness," said Cooke, 41, who responded to The Times' questions by fax rather than submit to a live interview. "The most miserable part of my exile has been the lack of a forum, the lack of a voice."

Though Sager declined previous offers to document the episode, this time he went along.

"Last year, Hugh Grant winked and bowed, said three Hail Marys, hit three stations of the media cross and was back on the set," said Sager, a writer-at-large for GQ. "But there was no prescribed route to salvation for Janet in those days. When she left for Paris in 1985, she wasn't familiar with the media confessional--pleading guilty through extenuating circumstances. Janet felt that telling her own story would seem self-serving so I agreed to do it."

The story quickly created a media stir. On the "Today Show," Bryant Gumbel played hardball with Cooke, until recently a $6-an-hour clerk in the Liz Claiborne department of a Kalamazoo, Mich., department store. Ben Bradlee, Washington Post executive editor at the time of the deception, declined to join her on "Nightline" a few days before. (He has yet to receive an apology from her, he told a convention of newspaper ombudsmen.)

In Hollywood, three studios did battle over a 12-hour stretch. Turner Pictures wanted the project for producer Denise Di Novi ("Little Women") while Fox 2000 had Lynda Obst ("Sleepless in Seattle") in mind. TriStar Pictures also dug in and ultimately won out.