As every one of its living, breathing fans would be able to tell you without so much as blinking, Breaking Bad will come to its end in less than two weeks’ time — and, with that, Bryan Cranston‘s multi-year, career-defining run as the world’s most troubled chemistry teacher will be embedded in the annals of television greatness. (Well, unless something goes terribly, horribly wrong in the show’s final hours.) This being an inevitability, it only makes sense that TV’s finest actor, himself no stranger to film, would be moving up to the finer medium in these immediate post-Walter White days.
To help speed the process along, it appears as though Cranston will take the lead in Trumbo, a Jay Roach-helmed biopic centered on the life of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, whose credits for Roman Holiday, Spartacus, Papillon, and A Guy Named Joe are only a very small part of the story. During the anti-Communist fervor of the ’50s, the suspected Red was driven from Hollywood — by which point his career and personal life was left in tatters. The amazing part? Trumbo managed to continue writing thereafter, eventually receiving a public revival of sorts through the support of John F. Kennedy, Otto Preminger, and Kirk Douglas. [TheWrap]
It’s evident, by now, that Cranston can do wonders with whatever gets thrown his way — e.g. consider the solid work derived from a flat character in Argo — and Roach, though not someone I get hugely excited about, is competent-enough for this kind of material. (As much was evidenced, I think, in Recount and Game Change.) As far as historical illustrations go, this one’s in fine shape early out. With a screenplay from John McNamara (as based on a book by Bruce Cook), Groundswell Productions will help Trumbo get off the ground in 2014.
In other biopics-following-the-life-of-a-film-figure-related news, TheWrap have also reported that Matt Bomer (Magic Mike, Suits) is attached to an untitled motion picture concerning the legendary, inimitable Montgomery Clift. Larry Moss — soon to roll cameras on his debut feature, Relative Insanity — is directing from a script by Christopher Lovick, himself a relative newcomer to that respective side of cinematic production; don’t read too much into that, right? At least Clift’s tale, like Trumbo’s, is no ordinary Hollywood narrative: the collaborations with Hitchcock and Huston are one thing, but a physically debilitating automobile wreck — and the drug / alcohol abuse which followed — should give the project a dramatic center. Bomer, needless to say, has much to benefit from.
Pier 3 Pictures are producing and hope to launch things next year, hopefully with no more actors in prosthetic makeup portraying The Master.
What do you think of Trumbo’s tale coming to life, and with Cranston in that role? How does a Bomer-led Montgomery Clift movie strike you?