It was just a few weeks ago we reported S. Craig Zahler had two potential features lined up, one was of his long-in-the-works script for The Big Stone Grid, which Michael Mann was once attached to. The other was an original project he was hoping to get financed. It looks like the latter one is moving ahead and we have the first details today.
Zahler will next direct the crime thriller The Bookie & the Bruiser, featuring a reteam with his Brawl in Cell Block 99 and Dragged Across Concrete star Vince Vaughn, who will star alongside Adrien Brody. Here’s the synopsis: “The Bookie & the Bruiser is set in 1959 New York City and features a pensive, Jewish fellow named Rivner and an oversized Italian-American tough named Boscolo from the Lower East Side, both of whom served overseas in World War II and returned changed men who no longer fit inside the lives they’d left behind. Uninterested in taking orders from bosses or playing by the rules of polite society, the two friends partner up as a bookmaker and an enforcer and create an illicit gambling operation that proves to be very profitable, though risky, and their situation gets rather sticky when they find themselves stuck between a powerful Irish gang and the Mafia.”
Ahead of production kicking off later this year, Anton will introduce the film to international distributors at the upcoming Marche du Film. UTA Independent Film Group and Range Media Partners arranged the financing and will be representing the North American distribution rights. Anthony Katagas will produce via his Keep Your Head Productions alongside Dave Caplan. C2 Motion Picture Group is fully financing the project.
“We are thrilled to be working with the visionary S. Craig Zahler on this action-packed tale of a searing conflict between the Irish-American and Italian Mafias in New York and see Vince and Adrien team up in this very unique power charged film,” says Anton CEO Sébastien Raybaud.
“I’m honored and humbled to be working with one of my favorite filmmakers. A S. Craig Zahler’s gangster movie is something I’m dying watch!” said Dave Caplan.