George Clooney To Direct & Produce ‘The Yankee Commandante’

Last year, alongside Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon, George Clooney picked up a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination for his work on "The Ides of March." It was the single nomination received for Clooney’s solid but pedestrian fourth directorial effort. Since 2002, Clooney’s ventured behind the camera once every three years, and he’s wasting no time in lining up potential projects, with another one now being added to his slate.

Clooney will again team up with Grant Heslov to produce “The Yankee Commandante,” and he'll direct as well. Focus Features won the bidding war for the film rights to this project, and they’ll no doubt be extremely happy that they’ve got a name like Clooney’s attached. The film is based on David Grann’s recent New Yorker story about William Alexander Morgan, an American who led a guerrilla force with Fidel Castro in the mountains of Cuba and helped overthrow the Batista dictatorship in 1958. He also helped foil a coup by the Dominican Republic’s dictator a year later, but fell out with Castro over his anti-Communist beliefs and was executed in 1961. Sounds like a ripping tale, and you can read the article published in May right here.

There's no word yet on when this might roll, but before anything can happen a script will need to be written. Clooney has a number of projects brewing via his Smoke House shingle with Heslov, and earlier this year he was nabbed by Sony to write, direct and star in the WWII tale "The Monuments Men." Which of these will come first remains to be seen, but clearly, Clooney is not lacking in options. [Variety]