Just over a year ago, coming in hot from Martin Scorsese‘s “The Wolf Of Wall Street,” buds Jonah Hill and Leonardo DiCaprio saw 20th Century Fox snap up the rights to the Vanity Fair article, “American Nightmare: The Ballad Of Richard Jewell” for the pair to star in. That was about the last anyone really heard of it, but the now the project has a big name director taking a look.
Deadline reports that Clint Eastwood is circling the director’s chair on the movie, but it seems that a dance between studios will need to be worked out before anything happens. The filmmaker has a longtime home at Warner Bros., so some sort of possible co-production deal with 20th Century Fox is being looked at. As for the story, it follows the 34 year-old security guard, Richard Jewell, who was falsely identified as the FBI’s prime suspect in the bombing of the Olympic park during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Hill would play Jewell, with DiCaprio eyeing the role of the Southern lawyer who took up his defense.
Again, nothing is set in stone just yet, but now that Eastwood is free from that remake of “A Star Is Born,” this sounds like a great project to bite into.
