Ben Affleck to direct TALES FROM THE GANGSTER SQUAD?
Ben Affleck is seeing a lot of critical success of his latest film The Town. Persoanlly I thought the movie was a mess, but it's been getting rave reveiws. Now, I loved Gone Baby Gone, and that movie proves to me that Afflect has a talent for telling stories trough the art of film, so I look forward to seeing another great project from him.
Tales From the Gangster Squad could be it. According to Vulture Warner Bros. has asked him to direct the movie. This would be a huge project for Afflect, and one that I'd like to see him pull off!
Warner Bros. is setting up the story as an action movie that will bring together an ensemble cast of top-level actors, much like what we saw with The Departed. As of right now there are no actors attached to star in the film.
The movie will be based on a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times written by Paul Lieberman back in 2008. The articles examine an LAPD unit that's set up in the 1940s to fend off the growing influence of the East Coast Mafia in the city. The police group ended up becoming very powerful, and the battles with the Mafia escalated leading to mayhem and betrayals. The LAPD unit was a secret "off the record" police task force who went after Meyer Harris "Mickey" Cohen, a high-profile gangster who was a member of the "Jewish Mafia".
Cohen started out as hired muscle for Al Capone in Chicago, but blossomed as a mogul after being sent to Los Angeles by Murder, Inc. kingpin Meyer Lansky to surveille Bugsy Siegel, who Cohen helped set up the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas and ran it's sports betting operation. He also ran a panoply of L.A. businesses, presumably as fronts to launder money — including floral shops, paint stores, nightclubs, casinos, gas stations, a haberdashery, and an ice cream parlor — before getting busted for tax evasion in 1950 and serving four years in federal prison.
Up-and-coming screenwriter Will Beall was hired by the studio to write the script for Gangster Squad. Beall is a former police officer and the author of a novel called L.A. Rex, which he's also helping develop into a feature film for producer Scott Rudin.
This story will make for an epic cops vs gangsters movie. You've got to read this series of articles over at the LA Times, this is an absolutely incredible story. It's titled Crusaders in the underworld: The LAPD take on organized crime, and here is the opening of the story...
The Gangster Squad was formed in 1946 to keep East Coast Mafia out of L.A. Its 'anything goes' approach endured through the 1950s in an era when justice was found far from the courthouse.
This is going to be a great film! As long as there's a solid script, Affleck should be able to put together a great film! As of right now Affleck has not accepted the offer to direct the film, but it would be cool to see him take it on, personally I think he'd be stupid not too.