Evan Wright will take on his own COCAINE COWBOYS

Journalist turned screenwriter Evan Wright (Generation Kill) will scribe Cocaine Cowboys for the big screen for Paramount, a movie which we told you back in January had Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg attached to adapt.

Centering around Jon Roberts, an injured Vietnam vet who by the age of 20 ended up in violent gang related takeovers of New York nightclubs in the early 70's. He would later find himself drug dealing in Miami earning up to billions of dollars for a Medellin drug cartel. Unbelievably he became a huge distributor of billions of dollars worth of cocaine and became such a big figure that he could bribe the Miami PD to shut down causeways, so in Grand Theft Auto style - he could race cars. The events were all chronicled in the 2006 documentary Cocaine Cowboys.

"It's really an exciting story about the secret history of America," Wright said. "It's also a story that outwardly seems familiar, but the more you get into it, it's never really been told this way. It's about a guy who was a cocaine smuggler in a mafia -- we kind of know those stories -- but he also worked closely with the government to smuggle arms for the Contras."

The project will be somewhat based on Wright's own "in the works" novel about Roberts, which I believe was coincidental after Paramount greenlit this project in January not aware of what Wright was doing. In February, the writer met with Roberts but after ignoring the film project... he finally approached Paramount and told them it was his "burning desire" to do this story for film. And just how could Paramount resist that? I'm keeping an eye on this one, it's shaping up so far so good right now. source - the hollywood reporter