David Koepp to Write THE THIN MAN for Johnny Depp and Rob Marshall

Screenwriter David Koepp has been hired to write the script for Johnny Depp and Rob Marshall's remake of The Thin Man. Koepp is a well known screenwriter who has worked on films such as Mission: Impossible, Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, Panic Room and a ton of other films. There's no doubt he'll do a great job bringing this story back to the big screen. Previous reports indicated that this new version of the film wold take elements from the first two movies, and work them into one story, "putting it into a period setting and giving it a Sherlock Holmes-like stylized treatment." According to Deadline the film will also include a couple of musical numbers, which isn't surprising for Marshall who also directed Chicago. Depp will play the character Nick in the story. Nick is a former detective who marries an adorable young socialite, drinks a lot and occasionally solves a case. 

For those of you not familiar with the property, here's a description of the book:

The Thin ManDashiell Hammett's classic tale of murder in Manhattan, became the popular movie series with William Powell and Myrna Loy, and both the movies and the novel continue to captivate new generations of fans.

Nick and Nora Charles, accompanied by their schnauzer, Asta, are lounging in their suite at the Normandie in New York City for the Christmas holiday, enjoying the prerogatives of wealth: meals delivered at any hour, theater openings, taxi rides at dawn, rubbing elbows with the gangster element in speakeasies. They should be annoyingly affected, but they charm. Mad about each other, sardonic, observant, kind to those in need, and cool in a fight, Nick and Nora are graceful together, and their home life provides a sanctuary from the rough world of gangsters, hoodlums, and police investigations into which Nick is immediately plunged.

A lawyer-friend asks Nick to help find a killer and reintroduces him to the family of Richard Wynant, a more-than-eccentric inventor who disappeared from society 10 years before. His former wife, the lush and manipulative Mimi, has remarried a European fortune hunter who turns out to be a vindictive former associate of her first husband and is bent on the ruin of Wynant's family fortune. Wynant's children, Dorothy and Gilbert, seem to have inherited the family aversion to straight talk. Dorothy, who has matured into a beautiful young woman, has a crush on Nick, and so, in a hero-worshipping way, does mama's boy Gilbert. Nick and Nora respond kindly to their neediness as Nick tries to make sense of misinformation, false identities, far-fetched alibis, and, at the center of the confusion, the mystery of The Thin ManRichard Wynant. Is he mad? Is he a killer? Or is he really an eccentric inventor protecting his discovery from intellectual theft?

The dialogue is spare, the locales lively, and Nick, the narrator, shows us the players as they are, while giving away little of his own thoughts. No one is telling the whole truth, but Nick remains mostly patient as he doggedly tries to backtrack the lies. Hammett's New York is a cross between Damon Runyon and Scott Fitzgerald--more glamorous than real, but compelling when visited in the company of these two charmers. The lives of the rich and famous don't get any better than this!

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