LOGAN Director James Mangold Set To Direct PATTY HEARST Biopic with Elle Fanning

Logan director James Mangold has landed another directing gig. He's currently working on a script for a solo X-23 film, and he's also going to direct a feature film adaptation of the children's book Crenshaw.

Now the director is set to helm an untitled Patty Hearst biopic based on the book by Jeffery Toobin which is called American Heiress. The story is said to trace the "audacious, kaleidoscopic and psychologically twisted story of a true-life Alice in Wonderland.”

It will follow Hearst’s capture and two-year detainment by the Symbionese Liberation Army in the mid 1970’s, as well as her transition from hostage to warrior. The kidnapped heiress captured the world’s attention when she was caught on tape participating in armed bank robberies. Her arrest and trial sparked a media frenzy.

According to Variety, Elle Fanning is in talks to take on the role of Hearst. She is a wonderfully talented actress and this will be a fantastic part for her to take on. Hearst was a Berkeley sophomore when she was kidnapped, and it was a huge surprise to the world when she emerged as a counter-culture revolutionary.

It's good to see that Mangold will be developing this project and I'm sure that he's going to end up giving us a great movie. Here's a full description of the book:

On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre “Tania.”
The weird turns of the tale are truly astonishing—the Hearst family trying to secure Patty’s release by feeding all the people of Oakland and San Francisco for free; the bank security cameras capturing “Tania” wielding a machine gun during a robbery; a cast of characters including everyone from Bill Walton to the Black Panthers to Ronald Reagan to F. Lee Bailey; the largest police shoot-out in American history; the first breaking news event to be broadcast live on television stations across the country; Patty’s year on the lam, running from authorities; and her circuslike trial, filled with theatrical courtroom confrontations and a dramatic last-minute reversal, after which the term “Stockholm syndrome” entered the lexicon.  
The saga of Patty Hearst highlighted a decade in which America seemed to be suffering a collective nervous breakdown. Based on more than a hundred interviews and thousands of previously secret documents, American Heiress thrillingly recounts the craziness of the times (there were an average of 1,500 terrorist bombings a year in the early 1970s). Toobin portrays the lunacy of the half-baked radicals of the SLA and the toxic mix of sex, politics, and violence that swept up Patty Hearst and re-creates her melodramatic trial. American Heiress examines the life of a young woman who suffered an unimaginable trauma and then made the stunning decision to join her captors’ crusade.
Or did she?
 

 

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