Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu To Direct 'Flim-Flam Man' Adaptation

Mexican auteur Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has enjoyed a nice rest since he delivered the bleak drama Biutiful at the Cannes Film Festival two years ago, the film that later earned two Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actor for lead Javier Bardem. Last year there was talk of him setting up the period vengeance thriller The Revenant with Sean Penn and Leonardo DiCaprio but, as tends to happen with busy people, it never really got any momentum and talk of the film went cold. Now Variety reports that he has put The Revenant aside for a little while and he is gearing up to direct a different project altogether, an adaptation of Jennifer Vogel's memoirs "Flim-Flam Man: The True Story Of My Father's Counterfeit Life," that he has setup at 20th Century Fox subsidiary New Regency. Adapted by Fair Game writer Jez Butterworth, the movie will actually be a biopic of the author's father John Vogel, the subject of the book, who "robbed banks, burned down buildings, scammed investors, plotted murder, and single-handedly counterfeited more than $20 million." He did it all in pursuit of the American dream to enjoy a rich and expansive life but the pressures he put on himself to commit the crimes in the name of his family left him to turn to drink and drugs abuse. If casting comes together, the movie could shoot this year. Sounds like an interesting movie and a good character portrait for an actor. With Inarritu setting the movie up, I just wonder if he will look to Sean Penn again, the actor who he used to such great effect in 21 Grams. This sounds like a project just up his street... No word on a title yet but there has already been a film titled 'The Film-Flam Man', a 1967 American comedy from The Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner that followed George C. Scott as "a deserter on the run from the United States Army, and the two team up to make money and keep out of reach of the law." That title won't be used for this project. When Butterworth wrote the script the title 'Flag Day' was used but it's believed that is out too and something else will be used. Here's the full synopsis of the book; A frank and intimate portrait of a charismatic, larger-than-life underworld figure, as told by the daughter who nearly followed in his footsteps. "Do unto others before they do unto you," John Vogel used to advise his daughter, Jennifer. By his account, the world was a crooked place and one had to be crooked in order to survive. A lifelong criminal, John robbed banks, burned down buildings, scammed investors, plotted murder, and single-handedly counterfeited more than $20 million. He also wrote a novel, invented a "jean stretcher," baked lemon meringue pies, and arranged for ten-year-old Jennifer to see Rocky in an empty theater on Christmas Eve. In his reckless pursuit of the American Dream, he could be genuinely good. When it came time to pass his phony bills, he targeted Wal-Mart for political reasons. In 1995, following John's arrest in what turned out to be the fourth-largest seizure of counterfeit bills in U.S. history, he managed to slip away, leaving his now grown daughter to wonder what had become of him. Framed around the six months Jennifer's father ran from the law, Flim-Flam Man vividly chronicles the police chase -- stakeouts, lie detector tests, even a segment on Unsolved Mysteries. In describing her tumultuous life with John Vogel, Jennifer deftly examines the messy, painful, and almost inescapable inheritance one generation bequeaths to the next.