Sean Penn and Ryan Gosling Offered Roles in Ruben Fleischer's GANGSTER SQUAD
Warner Bros. has finally given Gangster Squad the green light! This is a film project I've really been looking forward to. It's a great story that will make for a freakin' cool gangster film. Last year Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer was attached to direct it, from a script written by up-and-coming screenwriter Will Beall who 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.
It's now been reported that Season Penn and Ryan Gosling are in talks to star in the film. Penn would take on the role of gangster Mickey Cohen, and Gosling would play one of two cops who try to bring him down.
The movie is be based on a series of articles from 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.
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 make one badass movie! What do you think?