Joel and Ethan Coen have been hired by Warner Bros. to write a film adaptation of Black Money, the 1966 novel by Ross MacDonald. It’s possible that they could end up directing the project as well.
The news was first reported by Deadline, today. Joel Silver (The Matrix, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movies) will produce and co-finance with Warner Bros. Steve White is executive producing.
Black Money features MacDonald’s detective Lew Archer, who is hired to get some dirt on a Frenchman who stole his client’s girlfriend. Things get really dangerous when he learns that his target is linked to a suicide and gambling debts.
MacDonald, who died in 1983, also wrote The Moving Target, which was the source for the 1966 Paul Newman movie Harper. Newman played Harper again in an adaptation of The Drowning Pool.
The Coens are finishing up work on Hail Caesar!, which Universal is curiously releasing on Feb. 5, 2016 instead of positioning it for an Oscar run. That film stars George Clooney, Ralph Fiennes, Scarlett Johansson, Jonah Hill and Frances McDormand.
The Coens are on the Oscar radar, having won awards for Fargo and No Country For Old Men. Their other films include Inside Llewyn Davis, The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Their filmography includes plenty of crime dramas, so Black Money looks like a project right up their alley.
image courtesy of Zak Hussein/INFphoto.com