You’re not going to be able to turn around over the next few months without running into Matt Damon. The actor leads both George Clooney‘s noirish romp “Suburbicon,” and Alexander Payne‘s ambitious “Downsizing.” And if you think the actor is returning to punching in the throat as Jason Bourne, guess again, though he is going for the groin….
READ MORE: ‘Suburbicon’ Finds George Clooney Doing Coen Brothers Karaoke [Venice Review]
The actor has signed up to star in “Charlatan,” an adaptation of the non-fiction book “Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam” by Pope Brock about famed conman John R. Brinkley, who got into the pockets and pants of the nation in the early 1910s, but promising the cure for male impotence. Here’s the book synopsis:
In 1917, John R. Brinkley–America’s most brazen con man–introduced an outlandish surgical method for restoring fading male virility.
It was all nonsense, but thousands of eager customers quickly made “Dr.” Brinkley one of America’s richest men–and a national celebrity. The great quack buster Morris Fishbein vowed to put the country’ s “most daring and dangerous” charlatan out of business, yet each effort seemed only to spur Brinkley to new heights of ingenuity, and the worlds of advertising, broadcasting, and politics soon proved to be equally fertile grounds for his potent brand of flimflam.
Culminating in a decisive courtroom confrontation, Charlatan is a marvelous portrait of a boundlessly audacious rogue on the loose in an America ripe for the bamboozling.
Excitingly, the excellent duo of Brian Koppelman and David Levien (“Ocean’s Thirteen,” “Billions,” “Rounders“) will be penning the script, though a director has yet to be attached. But it should be no problem for Damon, who is also producing, to land some major talent. [Variety]