Casey Affleck is also reportedly aboard to play ‘The Corrupt Midget’
By: Brad Brevet
Published: Wednesday, October 26th 2011 at 4:29 PM
The Oscar-winning scribes, Boston natives and friends behind Good Will Hunting are teaming once again as Ben Affleck and Matt Damon will work as director and star respectively on a film based on the recently captured South Bostonian gangster James ‘Whitey’ Bulger for Warner Bros.
The news surfaced as Damon told GQ, “We’re doing a Whitey Bulger movie… There are a couple of competing movies and I don’t think it’s been announced yet that we’re doing it, but the sooner it’s announced the better, just because everyone else will back off, hopefully. I’m really excited about it.”
Damon is expected to play Bulger, the leader of South Boston’s Winter Hill Gang who was a Top 10 Fugitive when he was apprehended by the FBI in Santa Monica, California back in June. Authorities had been hunting the 81-year-old for 16 years and was wanted for 19 murders, among other charges.
CNN did a piece on Bulger following his arrest in which Tom Foley, the organized crime investigator who spent most of his career with the Massachusetts State Police trying to put Bulger behind bars, said, “The guy is a sociopathic killer… He loved that type of life. He’s one of the hardest and cruelest individuals that operated in the Boston area. He’s a bad, bad, bad guy.”
“Sopranos” and “Boardwalk Empire” scripter Terence Winter is penning the script, which will reportedly cover Bulger’s youth to his incarceration on Alcatraz, through his rise to become a mob boss while secretly serving as an FBI informant for decades.
It was also reported that Affleck’s younger brother, Casey Affleck, will play Bulger’s brother William who’s also known as “The Corrupt Midget”.
Wikipedia tells us William Bulger is a retired American Democratic Party politician, lawyer, and educator from South Boston, Massachusetts, who for many years was President of the Massachusetts Senate and president of the University of Massachusetts. He was forced to resign from the office of president of the University of Massachusetts after it was revealed that he had communicated with his fugitive brother, James J. Bulger.
There is no telling when the project will get underway as Affleck finishes up Argo for a September 2012 release and Damon also recently announced he’s going to make his directorial debut on a film he co-wrote with John Krasinski. Affleck is also being sought by Warner Bros. to write and direct an adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Stand.”
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