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EXCLUSIVE: In this tough marketplace, if you want to make another movie about a complex historical figure like Robert F Kennedy, you’d better bring to the table an actor with chops and bankability to excite a financier. Matt Damon does both those things. I’ve just heard that a deal closed at New Regency for an RFK film that has Damon attached, with Gary Ross directing and Steven Knight scripting. Damon will wait to see the script before we know whether or not the project will really happen. The film will be based on the Evan Thomas biography His Life, which Landscape Entertainment’s Bob Cooper optioned and will produce with Ross and his Larger Than Life partner Alison Thomas.
While Damon just played South African rugby star Francois Pienaar in Invictus, he has never played a real figure like Kennedy. The film will trace RFK’s transformation from the younger brother in the shadow brother President John F Kennedy to a strong national leader in his own right before he was gunned down in 1968. His assassination at the Ambassador Hotel was the backdrop for Emilio Estevez’s Bobby, and Chris Columbus and his 1492 partners are developing The Last Campaign on RFK’s presidential run. Ross, too, has long been fascinated with Kennedy and once optioned the Thomas book himself.
Knight, the Eastern Promises writer, just got hired by Columbia Pictures to adapt the Dan Brown novel The Lost Symbol. That came thanks to his work for the studio on Pawn Sacrifice, a drama about Bobby Fischer’s unlikely victory over Russian chess champ Boris Spassky. Tobey Maguire is producing and eyeing the Fischer role. Cooper, Ross, and Thomas were already collaborating on another U.S. history project, the Jack Greenberg-Thurgood Marshall story Crusaders, which they’ve set at HBO with Danny Strong writing the script.
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RFK gave some great speeches which should lighten the load a little for the writers. I agree Damon’s a great pick. I wonder how the uncertainty about the Mass Film Tax Credit will impact the filming. Should have some great scenes in Hyannis Port.
Also interesting is how a well done movie can impact today’s political climate. Ironically, RFK received an appointment from Joe McCarthy and was fond of the Republican senator. He battled Jimmy Hoffa and other union officials. Very interesting man.
If I were going to do this, I would make a movie about what he was going to do, not what he did. I mean, think about it. We all know how that story ends, huh? What about, he becomes president and then there is a nuclear misunderstanding with the cubans and from space, we enact the fist strategic defense weapon that had been invented as part of an accelerated response to JFK’s death and so we neutralize the Russians in the Western Hemisphere, thus opening Bobby to continue JFK’s desire for space exploration. Bobby then would go to space himself to prove it is worthwhile, but goes through a time warp two three weeks before JFK’s assassination. He’s then forced to consider stopping it, or becoming president. He chooses but you never know which one…AAAAAAAAAAND Scene.
If I were going to do this, I would make a movie about what he was going to do, not what he did. I mean, think about it. We all know how that story ends, huh? What about, he becomes president and then there is a nuclear misunderstanding with the cubans and from space, we enact the fist strategic defense weapon that had been invented as part of an accelerated response to JFK’s death and so we neutralize the Russians in the Western Hemisphere, thus opening Bobby to continue JFK’s desire for space exploration. Bobby then would go to space himself to prove it is worthwhile, but goes through a time warp tanking him to three weeks before JFK’s assassination. He’s then forced to consider stopping it, or becoming president etc. He chooses but you never know which one…AAAAAAAAAAND Scene.
RFK? Really? That lightweight can support a biopic?
What a sad little person you are.
Agree with John. If RFK was a lightweight, this country and the world could use many more lightweights.
No one cares about RFK. I mean only liberals do but real Americans don’t care. These studios and media keep these Kennedy’s alive, when they’re nothing but losers. Will this movie be an interpretation of RFK getting a real job and actually doing something productive with his life, or benefiting from his Bootlegging Fathers $$ who paid for high office for his son’s to legitimize his name. Not one of these people have done a thing in their lives except tell everyone else how things ought to be. This movie will be a flop. Also Damon is too mouthy on his political views. If he doesn’t start keeping his trap shut he risks becoming Jane Fonda. Note to Matt: We don’t care about your politics until it starts interfering with what the founders created America to be, which goes against your incredibly liberal, and border line, if not over the border Marxist views. When you turn all YOUR wealth over to Barry the Pious then you can start telling American’s your thoughts, until then, keep doing what you do best, be pretty, look good and just like the president, recite the lines someone else writes for you. If we get to know the real you, as with the president, we’re not going to like you. Actors live in play worlds and shoot their mouths off in an effort to be taken seriously. Matt’s views are seriously dangerous.
Well said. The Kennedy’s were devious, massively corrupt, arrogant, snobbish, and as phony as the Fiji Mermaid. JFK was a drug addict (eating hydro-cordizone & mainlining pure speed). He suffered from a drug induced psychosis from the speed and was determined to launch a nuclear strike straight to the Kremlin. All because his Russian counterpart played him like a violin on their first summit. Had JFK lived, his legacy would have left us in a pre-industrialized state. That is, if anyone were left.
If you want to know the truth about JFK, watch “Altered Statesman”. It’s a documentary on that maniac that will knock you for a loop. It will also leave you with the notion that JFK might well have been killed by his own people in order to avoid a nuclear war.
Wow, another Repressed, Republican speaks. You should take your Hillbilly values, and join the Tea Party Movement. I forgot you probably believe the world is flat also. By the way Republicans suck
Only Liberals care about RFK? Only real americans care about RFK, and people like yu should leave the country, those who supported George Bush taking us to war under false pretenses, and talk about a person who never had a real job. Bush, was a draft dodger, so go join your little Tea Party Movement, that has no minorities in it, and keep your mouth shut.
Any one calling RFK a light weight must listen to Rush and all the right wing BS , as history documents the compassion RFK felt for the poor, history will document the right wings will to destroy America
It’s amazing how similar to the trades Deadline is becoming, this could have been an interesting story, but is so fucking boring…it follows all the trade traps, including pretty much revealing the source (I hope the writer’s agents get a bonus). I find myself checking this site less and less and realized it’s not only because the new people are sooooo boring, but because Nikki is not Nikki anymore, she is a manager or employee or something, I just don’t get it.
Why would Bob Cooper make another film about RFK? His last one at FX that starred Linus Roache was really quite good. What more is there to say on the subject, Bob?
Excuse me. I’d day that there is a HUGE amount still waiting, is yet largely unsaid.
Consider this aspect: the younger brother played an outsized role in the JFK administration and despite their father’s old business relationships, they went after the Mob with abandon. After the Cuban defense minister secretly turned against Castro in the early spring of ’63 and extended feelers to the U.S. president, Bobby took the helm and began organizing an overthrow of Castro. A coup de grace was organized during that summer, the time that civil rights protesters were on the march all across the country and the Diem regime in South Vietnam began rainding Buddhist temples. Not even Robert Strange McNamara was let in on the plot. Only a select few in the Pentagon and the CIA were party to the effort.
Exactly how a very few extremist individuals in The Agency came to divulge the plot to their Mob collaborators and how the Mob thence, having that information, proceeded to decapitate the Kennedy administration with impunity, the fact that the younger brother veritably engineered his brother’s death and that his suffering, the emotional aftermath, became romantically involved with the president’s widow over a span of four years and then proceeded to seek the presidency himself and lead the nation out of the quagmire of Vietnam into which the country had descended as a direct result of JFK’s death is irony piled upon irony. It is a story so loaded with human intricacy that no second or third rate producers, writers or directors should be involved.
“…engineered his brother’s death and that his suffering, the emotional aftermath, became romantically involved with the president’s widow over a span of four years…”
Ewww, don’t go there.Please don’t…
Better yet, NO ONE should be involved….at all! This is crap.
Don’t pay any attention at all to what a pariah like C. David Heymann says…
Bob Cooper is obsessed. Bobby was a great men, but let’s move on already.
Hopefully the biopic won’t be a whitewash. The “Camelot” routine with the Kennedys is old hat and won’t fly anymore. Bobby had plenty of warts. How about those stories that he went to a nude beach near Malibu with Marilyn Monroe?? That’ll sell a few tickets!! Bobby made great speeches, but there’s plenty of sleaze there as well, political and sexual. The MM connection is pretty scandalous, right up to her “suicide.” A honest portrayal should make a fascinating movie IF lib Hollywood does it right.
Agreed on the Camelot comments. The real Camelot resembles the life of “Fred G. Sanford” in reality.
Can’t imagine people will be rushing to see this. BOBBY had wall to wall stars and even they couldn’t drag people to see a movie that was political in tone. Why does Hollywood keep churning out movies about politics and war when none of the recent ones have made a dime? Just so the actors and hacks can pat themselves on the back for being “important”?
They could actually make RFK’s story pertinent to current events by pulling back the curtain on “Camelot”, a mythic moniker created by Jackie for a press statement on the assassination of her husband, and including Bobby’s decades-long feud with (and possible murder ordered by) Aristotle Onasis, affairs with Marilyn AND Jackie, long history of political bribes and threats, graft, and favors… Just ask Peter Evans.
The Kennedy clan with their corrupt culture would not be able to operate under the scrutiny of today’s unrelenting media. Oh wait– of course they could– and so many others DO. People are just too busy watching American Idol to care.
Whether you like him or not, RFK had an interesting life that was cut short. Check out the wiki page on him. No need to focus on the JFK years or any frolicking, it’s the prior years and the post years (including his tense relationship with LBJ) that many would find surprising. If they focus on his entire life, I think enough material to create a very compelling biopic.
The focus of Bobby was not RFK so I think there’s plenty of room for a great movie. Who plays LBJ, Joe McCarthy (should include since interesting), Hoffa, King and many other important historical figures will be important.
I agree — Matt Damon is a great pick for RFK. This should be interesting!
That’s great that RFK will be portrayed in a proper biopic. Some people think that “Bobby” was the most recent biopic, but it wasnt a biopic at all, like this article said.
if Damon plays RFK,i recommend Affleck as JFK ;-D…it’s been a long time,u know…
I can only assume that Taylor Lautner turned down the role before it was offered to Matt Damon.
I totally agree that Affleck needs to be in this film. And Kevin Smith too.
And Ruth Buzzy, the ghost of “Soupy Sales”, Marty Allen, Cher, the ghost of Rip Taylor, oh and throw a chimp in there for good measure. Don’t forget Barry Williams (greg brady) as Chief of Staff.
T’Doh!!!
no, no, no!!! Ms. Buzzy must reprise the role of Schegundelah, the wild-assed character that she portrayed on T.V.s The Red Skelton Show.
Ever since, I’ve not seen anything near as funny.
It’s interesting how “Bobby” hasn’t scared off Hollywood from making a movie about RFK. But you are right, if anyone can be taken serious in that role, it’s Damon.
Seriously about what….? What did RFK ever actually “DO?” This Hollywood Hero worship is pathetic
RFK like all the Kennedy family loved sailing. Pictures are plentiful of Bobby or Jack on the on the water with high winds moving their sails and white caps lapping against the boat.
Through these storms they always made it back home safe.
But this movie boat ride already has it’s course laid out. The helmsman of this adventure is a hack. Their is no moral compass to tell a great story of a great man in in this captain. He will not get to the soul of Robert. Please right the ship change course
Great man? You mean, “great” as in great megalomaniacs like the great Idi Amin, or the great Noriega, or the great Castro, or the great Stalin, or the great Hussein, or the great bin Laden, or the great Bathory, or the great Vlad Dracula, or would it be more in the line of the great Moe, the great Larry, and the great Curly?
Gary Ross is a hack and a half, but Steven Knight is one of the best writers in movies — both Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises were terrific scripts, with DPT getting an Oscar nomination, and Eastern Promises badly overlooked for one.
Hmmm, last time I checked didn’t Ross have 4 Oscar noms?? This sounds cool to me. Looking forward to it.
If I were writing the film, I’d consider having the film end not at the Ambassador, but in April 1968, when RFK gave that moving, off the cuff speech in Indianapolis the night of the King assassination. It eloquently spoke of the need not to take revenge as a reaction to tragedy, invoking his own memories of his brother’s murder. Indianapolis was one of the few urban centers not to have riots that night, and RFK is the reason why.
In the list of Bobby Kennedy pictures, one should not omit “RFK” (2002), also produced by Robert Cooper.
A movie that Bob Cooper Executive Produced for FX as well. I have to say, it’s odd that he’s double dipping like this, but then again, you do what you have to do to stay relevant these days!
I hope they’re fair. RFK the image versus the reality, an inspirational speaker for a generation versus the ruthless behind-the-scenes prick, a voice against Vietnam versus the guy who joined the 1968 race only after Eugene McCarthy scored many early votes, a symbol of liberalism versus McCarthy’s buddy.
All good stuff for movie, just don’t make it too much of a love letter or hate mail. Many fine movies made out of complicated figures.
YAWN. Thankfully, the reign of the Kennedy dynasty ended when the philanderer and boozer, the dishonorable Teddy Kennedy bit the dust a few months ago. Nobody cares about the Kennedys any longer. Over the years, Hollywood has created a legacy about this family on both the big screen and small screen which is largely mythology. How many more works of fiction do we need about this bunch of self-indulgent, northeastern liberals? Their accomplishments were thin and the scandals were wide. I smell a box office bomb.
The Kennedys have had one of the most last impacts on modern American history than any other family has. The Kennedys are human like anyone else and have made mistakes, but there is no one more honorable who served in the Senate in the last decades than Senator Kennedy.
You simply cannot be serious. Joe Kennedy was a Boot Legging Law Breaker. He purchased high office for his sons in an effort to “legitimize” his name. JFK to his credit was a war hero in WWII, but his premature death has placed an average president into “legendary” status. Had he finished his first term I doubt we’d be talking about him. RFK was little more than JFK’s brother. Eddy however was essentially “Scraps” in the family. All Kennedy’s are arrogant nothings. They live above the law and not a one of them knows and honest day’s work. JFK was a philanderer at the least, RFK too, Ed was at least a murderer, William Kennedy Smith a rapist, Joe Kennedy had a 12 year marriage annulled? With 4 children how do you get a marriage annulled? Patrick Kennedy is in and out of rehab, crashes cars and never pays the price. RFK Jr jets all over the globe in his private jet telling everyone else to stop polluting and crusades for Climate Change, don’t forget Michael Skakel RFK’s nephew who is in prison for life, for the murder of a young woman almost 40 yrs ago. Tell me his parents and those close to him, “didn’t know”…..the list goes on…. These people have escaped justice, never known correction or discipline and avoided responsibility their entire privileged lives. Poor Jackie that she involved herself with these people. The media hates the Bush’s, a true American Political Dynasty but loves the Kennedys’ and one must ask why? The media stands for nothing but style over substance and that of course is the Kennedy legacy. (I’ll throw that other philandering, lying, thieving family that rules don’t apply too either, the Clintons”). Ed Kennedy’s legacy is Socialism and the Ruling Elite. We’re better than you and we’ll tell you what is best for you, and oh, the rules we make for you do not apply to us. He and his ilk have damaged our nation. His advocacy of “Barry the Pious” may have caused the permanent destruction of what the people have made and God has blessed. He will not be missed. My prayer is for his soul and that he and his Maker reconciled prior to his passing. If not, then and only then would I weep for this man.
Agree that Matt Damon is a great pick.
Hope that they will also show and include his transformation over the years. From his political beginnings with McCarthy, where he saw things pretty black and white to the time in late 60′s as New York senator and then later as presidential candidate where he really worked to solve the problems of middle and lower class people.
Also his was actually one of the first politicians who adimitted that war in Vietnam was wrong and started to oppose it.
How is Matt Damon “bankable?” Other than movies with “Bourne” in the title, his films basically tank.
And what is left to say about Bobby Kennedy, another rich White guy from a political dynasty and part of nepotism central? A guy who was a Cold War figure (Desegregation, anti-Communism, Vietnam) as distant today as the Garfield Administration was to the Jazz Age.
In an era when the son of a Billionaire Nigerian Banker wants to blow up his underwear to drop an airliner on Detroit, out of Jihad, how exactly is a long-dead guy like Bobby Kennedy relevant …
Unless it is to discuss the reason Sirhan Sirhan gave for killing him — Bobby Kennedy’s speech in support of Israel’s existence. Arguably RFK’s murder was the first act of Jihad against America, the opening act to 9/11. Even though Hollywood liberals want to pretend it wasn’t so.
Since the appetite of Hollywood for confronting the ugly reality of Jihad (and our rapidly eroding margins of safety) is near zero, I’m sure this movie will be the usual hagiography of the sacred Kennedy dynasty, an all too obvious allegory of how ordinary people should be ruled by a hereditary “enlighted” group.
The real question is this: who will play Whiskey in HIS biopic? This guy’s a trip…
Clearly, it should be Glenn Beck, since they both share the same tenuous grip on reality.
Jesus, Whiskey, are you even able to post something that doesn’t have an obvious right wing slant to it? We get it – you don’t like liberals. Enough already.
You’re beginning to bore me. Scratch that, you are boring me.
For “whiskey”
If you are looking it from this perspective than you have to agree that all politicians are corrupted and that they are all demagogues…Democrats and Republicans. All the republican presidents started this wars and justify them with: “We have to spread democracy”. But it is all about the money. Bush and Cheney don’t (didn’t) care for the USA they attacked Iraq and Afghanistan just to make money.
But I agree that it wasn’t correct that Al Qaeda killed those innocent people on 9/11 and other terrorist attacks but that they should harm the ones that were responsible for the situation in the middle east.
After JFK’s assassination Robert F. Kennedy became one of the greatest American politicians of all time. He really worked for people no matter what “color” they were and understood them.
I think that Damon will be amazing in this role as RFK.
No one cares about RFK. The movie will be a flop. Heard it here first.
Thank you, Alex.. Yes!!!
I don’t understand the “what’s left to say about RFK?” mentality. Hollywood has barely looked at or touched upon this fascinating, multifaceted man. “Bobby” wasn’t a biopic and “RFK” starring Linus Roach was good but pretty bare-bones and probably isn’t that well known of a film anyway. The pre-1963 Bobby may have been a dated, Cold War figure, but after Jack’s assassination RFK really evolved, and the things he decided to fight for — namely peace and equality — are as relevant today as ever.
“Other then Bourne his films basically tank”
Really?
Good Will Hunting=made money; Saving Private Ryan=Made Money; Rounders=profitable; Oceans 11/12=made money; The Departed=made money; and yes, the 3 born films. All of which made sick money.
So, uh, looking over his resume, not a lot of outright tanks. He’s definitely not box office poison, not by a long shot. And even some of the lesser earning films made solid second market money.
Gary Ross a hack? Hmm. He may not be the edgiest filmmaker around, but his track record is pretty impeccable and unless I’m mistaken he has a bunch of Oscar nominations for both writing and directing. Having said that, he and Damon working together sounds like a recipe for another dull but worthy Invictus-style project.
One hates to toot one’s own horn, but I wish Gary Ross and Matt Damon would take a look at my alternative history novel about RFK surviving 1968, and becoming president. It received acclaim from historians and those who knew RFK, as well as leading literary writers and professors. And it received a starred review in Publishers’ Weekly.
I think even those who consider RFK just another Cold War hack, as referenced on this comment thread, may be surprised about the ironies and depth of changes that come from a different road taken in 1968.
Damon is ironically someone I always thought should play RFK, and Gary Ross, who I believe wrote “Dave” (Kevin Kline was amazing in that film), would definitely understand.
Mitchell Freedman’s book is one of the most provocative books I have ever read. The future he portends had RFK not been killed would have taken this country in a direction that is 180 degress from who we’ve become. For starters, there would not have been a Vietnam War as conducted by LBJ and McNamara and their Gulf of Tonkin lie, but more importantly, there would not have been a Nixon presidency which may then have reversed the now deeply rooted cynicism we Americans have toward our politics and institutions which, in my opinion, were the early seeds of discontent that have become our current political state. I can’t say that RFK would have completely re-ordered our lives, but can you imagine our Presidents had he been elected in 68 and reelected in 72? Would we have endured the morass of Jimmy Carter? Would Reagan, who would have run and then won in ’76 been in office too soon to for the emergence of Gorbachev and Perestroika? If you are a fan of politics, Freedman’s book is beautifully reasoned and thoughtful in the hope of his premise. And I don’t even know the man.
if they’re looking to use the Ambassador Hotel for location shooting, it’s not there anymore. sold to the LA public school system (which has PLENTY of schools already) and demolished. proof that LA has no regard for history. Merv and Trump didn’t do shit with the property when they owned it!