Ben Affleck to Direct Dennis Lehane's LIVE BY NIGHT
Gone Baby Gone director Ben Affleck is in talks to direct yet another novel by Dennis Lehane for the big screen called Live By Night. If everything works out he will also write the screenplay and star in the film. This sounds like a great story for Affleck to take on.
The story is set in Boston during the Prohibition, and it centers on a character named Joe Coughlin, "who rebels against his cop father and becomes a career criminal, eventually joining a mobster. He rises up the ranks as the action moves to Tampa, Fla., then Cuba and features rumrunners, femme fatales, betrayals and good men committing plenty of sin."
Affleck's Argo opened up this weekend, and it's been getting great reviews. No word yet on if this will be his next movie, as he's also attached to direct the big screen adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand.
Leonardo DiCaprio's production company Appian Way will also produce the movie alongside Affleck. I like Affleck as a director, he seems to have a great vision for the stories he tells, and this sounds like a movie that will be worth my time to watch. What do you think about Affleck taking on this project?
Here's the Description of the Book:
Boston, 1926. The '20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world.
Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city's most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw.
But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. In a time when ruthless men of ambition, armed with cash, illegal booze, and guns, battle for control, no one—neither family nor friend, enemy nor lover—can be trusted. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. But until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt.
Joe embarks on a dizzying journey up the ladder of organized crime that takes him from the flash of Jazz Age Boston to the sensual shimmer of Tampa's Latin Quarter to the sizzling streets of Cuba. Live by Night is a riveting epic layered with a diverse cast of loyal friends and callous enemies, tough rumrunners and sultry femmes fatales, Bible-quoting evangelists and cruel Klansmen, all battling for survival and their piece of the American dream. At once a sweeping love story and a compelling saga of revenge, it is a spellbinding tour de force of betrayal and redemption, music and murder, that brings fully to life a bygone era when sin was cause for celebration and vice was a national virtue.