Gibson was the first name I thought of too when I was reading this! He’s got the guts and the money to do it. We need the author to start on a script right away!
No need for a new script - the Victorian author G. A. Henty wrote a book about the siege of Malta entitled, “A Knight of the White Cross”. You can read it for free if you download it from the Gutenberg Project. (WWW.GUTENBERG.ORG)