HOLLYWOOD (Variety) - Howard Hughes is flying again.
The feature film or telefilm or miniseries based on "Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters: The Definitive Biography of the First American Billionaire" (New Millennium) by Richard Hack will be produced and directed by Billy Friedkin.
New Millennium's owner-publishers Michael Viner and wife Deborah Raffin will also produce. Jim Wiatt of ICM put the package together.
Friedkin tells me, "I've been fascinated by Hughes ever since I came to Hollywood in the '60s. He is a kind of King Lear -- without the daughters."
Friedkin allows the story could be a three-hour movie -- "there are so many stories; his genius as a visionary, the (weird) Hollywood saga, how he transformed Vegas, how he revised the airline industry, and of course, the sex."
Friedkin had early-on learned about Hughes from Walter Kane, "who always carried the red phone with him. He whet my appetite about Hughes." He also learned from Joe Rivkin of the William Morris Agency.
Friedkin said he'd start the story with Hughes as the 16-year-old schoolboy who was informed that his father died and told he was to take over the Hughes Tool Co.
Who would play Hughes? Names mentioned include Johnny Depp, Edward Norton and Leonardo DiCaprio. Warren Beatty has long talked about playing Howard Hughes -- for his own film, that is. Terry Moore, who claimed to have married Hughes, had talked to Alan Ladd about filming her Hughes, but Ladd nixed it. (Meanwhile, Moore's unhappy about Hack's book.)
Hack heads out next week on the promotional trail with his hardcover as the audio (New Millennium as well) as read by Dan Cashman is released. The Daily Mail paid six-figures to serialize in England.
The book is fascinating to those of us who lived through his later era in Hollywood and Las Vegas and it will be to those who only knew the myth -- and mysteries. A script is, of course, next for the proper screen.
Before all of this, Friedkin returns to directing Hunted, Jan. 21. The pic was interrupted when Benicio Del Toro, who co-stars with Tommy Lee Jones, broke his wrist in a freak on-the-set accident eight months ago, with only seven days left to complete the Par pic. And the Friedkin-William Blatty legal suit vs. WB claiming they were cheated out of profits on the 2000 re-release of The Exorcist is proceeding to a court date.
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Reuters/Variety REUTERS
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