While his latest, long-in-the-works adaptation of Jack Kerouac‘s seminal novel On the Road left a little to be desired, director Walter Salles is taking no time to find his next project. According to Variety the helmer is taking over an adaptation of The Man in the Rockefeller Suit, a film that was set up over 15 months ago with Crazy Heart and Out of the Furnace director Scott Cooper at the helm.
Salles will now helm the Fox Searchlight project, which has been compared to a real-life Talented Mr. Ripley. Based on Mark Seal’s 2011 novel following the German Christian Gerhartsreiter, the film is a wild story of kidnapping, murder and lies. Salles nailed his naturalistic characters in his last adaptation and while he transferred the narrative the best he could, this tale seems to have a more cinematic quality, at least in a strictly entertainment sense. Check out the synopsis from Amazon below.
The story of Clark Rockefeller is a stranger-than-fiction twist on the classic American success story of the self-made man-because Clark Rockefeller was totally made up. The career con man who convincingly passed himself off as Rockefeller was born in a small village in Germany. At seventeen, obsessed with getting to America, he flew into the country on dubious student visa documents and his journey of deception began.
Over the next thirty years, boldly assuming a series of false identities, he moved up the social ladder through exclusive enclaves on both coasts-culminating in a stunning twelve-year marriage to a rising star businesswoman with a Harvard MBA who believed she’d wed a Rockefeller.
The imposter charmed his way into exclusive clubs and financial institutions-working on Wall Street, showing off an extraordinary art collection-until his marriage ended and he was arrested for kidnapping his daughter, which exposed his past of astounding deceptions as well as a connection to the bizarre disappearance of a California couple in the mid-1980s.
The story of The Man in the Rockefeller Suit is a probing and cinematic exploration of an audacious imposer-and a man determined to live the American dream by any means necessary.
Are you looking forward to Salles next project?