An Update on Brian De Palma's THE BOSTON STRANGLERS!

Beaks here...

We haven't heard much about THE BOSTON STRANGLERS since it was announced last June as a potential directing gig for Brian De Palma, but, according to producer Gale Anne Hurd, it's still (tentatively) scheduled to go before cameras in 2009. For those of you questioning the need for another "Boston Strangler" movie when Richard Fleischer did such a bang-up job with his 1968 feature (I'm not a fan), here's Hurd defending her project to UGO's intrepid movie blogger, Jenna Busch:

It’s based on Susan Kelly’s book called The Boston Stranglers, because everything that we think we know is wrong. There was a film made right after the events called THE BOSTON STRANGLER starring Tony Curtis and Henry Fonda. And it posits that Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler, but the truth is, if you scratch beneath the surface, Albert DeSalvo was never charged with the crimes. He was actually incarcerated for another series of assaults, and there was not one shred of evidence linking him to the crimes. So the film is very much (about) how did things go so wrong, that to this day we all think Albert DeSalvo was tried and convicted as the Boston Strangler?

The massive-in-scope screenplay (a recent draft by Alan Rosen ran over 160 pages) starts small with DeSalvo's first string of crimes (he talked his way into the homes of lonely/neglected women by pretending to be a scout for a modeling agency), but quickly turns into a multi-layered dramatization of the botched police investigation, the intense, often unhelpful media scrutiny (courtesy of an ambitious young female reporter for The Boston Herald), and DeSalvo's jailhouse confession to convicted murderer George Nassar (who got F. Lee Bailey involved). It's kinky, bloody and full of betrayal; in other words, it's ideal material for De Palma. Right now, he's just got to find the narrative throughline. (According to De Palma a la Mod, the director is currently overseeing a rewrite of that earlier, very lengthy draft.) Being that it's a period yarn, securing the requisite financing could prove difficult. Are there any affordable international locations that could convincingly double for 1960s Boston? By the way, you should definitely read the rest of Busch's interview with Ms. Hurd. She also discusses a remake of ALIEN NATION, a take on the Arthurian legend called GALAHAD, and the Top Cow comic MAGDALENA.