I saw the news surface that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio would be reteaming on an adaptation of Erik Larson‘s “The Devil in the White City” and I initially thought it was old news. I mean, DiCaprio has been attached to this project since 2010, but this is the first time Scorsese’s name has been attached. In fact, the likes of David Fincher and Kathryn Bigelow were unable to get this one off the ground and even as recently as last December, Oscar-winning screenwriter Graham Moore (The Imitation Game) mentioned his draft in an interview with me. Yet, that’s another difference between this announcement and previous ones.
[amz asin=”B000FC0ZIA” size=”small”]Scorsese and DiCaprio won’t be working from Moore’s draft as they’ve brought Billy Ray (Captain Phillips) in to write the screenplay, which tells the story of H.H. Holmes, a serial killer in Chicago, set against the backdrop of the preparation of 1893’s Chicago’s World Fair. I have actually been trying to read this book for about the last month and a half and as fascinating as Holmes’ portion of the story is, the aspects dealing with the World’s Fair have been a bit of a slog. Here’s the Amazon synopsis:
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds–a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium. Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake.
My inability to finish the book (though I may have to now) does not lead me to believe this will be a bad film, in fact, I’m sure the aspects I find mundane will be excised and with DiCaprio lined up to play Holmes this is wonderful news.
The film is set up at Paramount and it seems a good bet it might arrive in time for next year’s Oscar season, that is unless it gets pushed to 2017 with attention largely given to Scorsese’s Silence, which has been rumored to play next year’s Cannes Film Festival. [Deadline]
