Warner Bros. Offers Ben Affleck Tales From the Gangster Squad

We just heard that Warner Bros. is very pleased with Affleck, The Town (worldwide gross to date: almost $ 60 million) that it offers a Tales from Gangster Squad, a script about the squad of the Los Angeles Police Department's off-the-books who tried to pursue the famous gangster Mickey Cohen outside the city in four decades.

(Cohen, for those unfamiliar, started out as a hired muscle for Al Capone in Chicago, but developed as a maestro when sent to Los Angeles by Murder, Inc. kingpin Meyer Lansky to surveille Bugsy Siegel, with whom Cohen helped organize the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas and his running sports-betting operation LA He is also running a business full of weapons, perhaps as a remedy for money laundering - including flower shops, paint shops, nightclubs, casinos, gas stations, haberdashery, and ice cream. salons - .. before getting arrested for tax evasion in 1950 and serves a four-year federal prison Spoiler alert)

Gangster Squad is interesting in that it is homegrown L.A. material about L.A. cops by an L.A. cop: It's nominally based on a 2008 series of articles by Los Angeles Times reporter Paul Lieberman, but was adapted for the screen by former South Central L.A. cop Will Beall, who is also a novelist (his L.A. Rex is already under option by Scott Rudin) and who's now a TV writer on ABC's crime drama Castle.

Still, it's not clear if Affleck will accept the gig, as he's also said to be considering directing Homeland, a pilot for Showtime from 24 producer Howard Gordon about a sleeper cell and an ex-CIA operative, and an unknown "two-hander" at Warner Bros. that might star his old pal Matt Damon.



source : vulture