James Mangold is picking up projects as fast as he can get them. The director of “Logan” has already put “The Force,” “Disorder,” and “Crenshaw” on his plate, but now he’s cooking up something that has a detail the other films don’t — a star.
Elle Fanning is in talks to lead a picture about Patty Hearst, directed by Mangold. Penned by the team of Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander (“Man On The Moon,” “Ed Wood,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt“), the duo are right in their wheelhouse with this drama that will detail the kidnapping of Patty Hearst in 1974 by the Symbionese Liberation Army. She would shock the world when it was revealed she wound up joining the revolutionaries, participating in their crimes. The movie will be based on the book “American Heiress” by Jeffrey Toobin, who also penned “The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson,” which became the basis of the acclaimed series. Here’s the book synopsis:
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On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a senior in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre “Tania.”
The weird turns of the tale are truly astonishing — the Hearst family trying to secure Patty’s release by feeding all the people of Oakland and San Francisco for free; the photographs capturing “Tania” wielding a machine gun during a bank robbery; a cast of characters including everyone from Bill Walton to the Black Panthers to Ronald Reagan to F. Lee Bailey; the largest police shoot-out in American history; the first breaking news event to be broadcast live on television stations across the country; Patty’s year on the lam, running from authorities; and her circuslike trial, filled with theatrical courtroom confrontations and a dramatic last-minute reversal, after which the phrase “Stockholm syndrome” entered the lexicon.
The saga of Patty Hearst highlighted a decade in which America seemed to be suffering a collective nervous breakdown. Based on more than a hundred interviews and thousands of previously secret documents, American Heiress thrillingly recounts the craziness of the times (there were an average of 1500 terrorist bombings a year in the early 1970s). Toobin portrays the lunacy of the half-baked radicals of the SLA and the toxic mix of sex, politics, and violence that swept up Patty Hearst; and recreates her melodramatic trial. American Heiress examines the life of a young woman who suffered an unimaginable trauma and then made the stunning decision to join her captors’ crusade.
Or did she?
The movie is set up over at Fox 2000. As per usual, no idea if or when this might move forward, but having Fanning on board certainly helps. This might be bad news for Jared Leto‘s planned directorial effort, “77,” a crime thriller set in 1974, following two police officers who team up to rescue abducted heiress Patty Hearst whilst concurrently investigating the murder of a comrade. Time will tell. [THR]
She is talented but really can’t carry a film. Would have loved to see Florence Pugh or Brianna Hildebrand for this.
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