Barry Levinson, the man behind Good Morning, Vietnam, Rain Man, Bugsy and more, last directed the dull found footage thriller The Bay. The film had its supporters, but trust me, it wasn’t any good. Since then he’s been attached to the Whitey Bulger biopic Black Mass, which I featured on my list of most anticipated films of 2014 and again this morning in my list of book adaptations heading to the screen this year. Well, scratch any hope of it hitting theaters this year and it appears scratch any hope of Levinson directing.
Levinson’s film was expected to feature Joel Edgerton while Johnny Depp as original slated to star, but then bounced, allegedly over money. Rumors of Depp bouncing on the project and off again persisted, but it seems the camel’s back has broken.
A new report from Deadline suggests Levinson is off the project, Depp may actually be back on and Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace) is circling the director’s chair.
Cooper is negotiating to direct and would rewrite Mark Mallouk‘s previous draft, adapted from the book by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil’s Deal.
The Deadline report seems to suggest Edgerton will no longer play FBI agent John Connolly, childhood friend of mobster James “Whitey” Bulger (Depp). The story would follow the lives of the two men as Connolly becomes a major figure in the FBI’s Boston office and Whitey becomes godfather of the Irish Mob. What happened between them – a dirty deal to trade secrets and take down Boston’s Italian Mafia in the process – would spiral out of control, leading to murders, drug dealing, racketeering indictments, and, ultimately, to Bulger making the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.
Ben Affleck has his own Bulger pic in the works over at Warner Bros. with Matt Damon lined up to star as the mobster with a script from Terence Winter (The Wolf of Wall Street), but with Affleck tackling Dennis Lehane’s Live by Night next it seems Black Mass will have the leg up.
