Milk writer to pen J Edgar Hoover biopic

What follows Milk? If you thought it was biscuits, it’s nil points for you because the answer is of course Hoover. Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black has signed on to deliver a script for a J Edgar Hoover biopic for Universal Pictures and Ron Howard’s production company Imagine Entertainment.

The film will focus on the career of the man who founded the FBI and was its first director, shaping it into the crime-fighting agency we know today. Hoover used tactics of harassment against dissenters, illegally collected evidence against any number of people in the political sphere and even bullied his own agents (for example Melvin Purvis who, after taking down Dillinger, ignited Hoover’s envy and was pushed out of the FBI). Fascinatingly, although he was the head of the FBI, he was an inveterate gambler who initially refused to acknowledge the Mafia, then proved loathe to expend resources on combating organized crime – some biographers suggest that this was because the Mafia was blackmailing him.

Lance Black is an obvious choice to pen the screenplay after Milk, which also required him to pull off a balancing act of the personal and political, which he did with award-winning aplomb. Since his Oscar-winning screenplay, he’s written six episodes of the acclaimed Mormon marriage drama Big Love, and has scripted and helmed the feature film What’s Wrong With Virginia (which sounds like a riff on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf but is in no way related; instead it’s a drama about a sheriff running for the senate whose campaign is derailed when his daughter starts seeing the son of the mentally unstable woman he’s been having an affair with for years), which rumour has it, is being considered for Cannes and stars Jennifer Connolly, Ed Harris and Emma Roberts. Lance Black also wrote the screenplay for Gus Van Sant’s take on Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – but that film project currently seems to be stalled.

There’s no director or actors yet attached to the project and it’s far too early to speculate (even for me). But we have seen plenty of onscreen Hoovers over the last few years.

The most interesting casting came thanks to Woody Allen who cast African-American actress Dorothi Fox as J Edgar Hoover in his 1971 political satire, Bananas. After that, things got a little more conventional. In 1992’s Chaplin (in which RDJ played the eponymous actor), Kevin Dunne played Hoover. Hoover’s next big screen incarnation came courtesy of Mario Van Peebles’ Panther, in which Richard Dysart was Hoover.

Next was 1995’s Nixon, in which Anthony Hopkins played the disgraced prez, and Bob Hoskins took the Hoover role. X-Files fans will remember that Hoover (under the title, ‘The Director’) was portrayed by Canadian actor David Fredericks. And in last year’s Public Enemies, the role was taken by Billy Crudup.

Pajiba broke the story, which you can check out here.