Affleck, Damon Together Again
After all these years together, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are finally making it legal.
The Oscar-winning Boston buddies will reunite onscreen in an untitled drama inspired by two real-life attorneys, who fight a 15-year battle to free an innocent man on death row, Daily Variety reports.
Save a couple of cameos in Kevin Smith’s Dogma and Jersey Girls, the twosome hasn’t headlined a movie together since 1997’s Good Will Hunting, for which they shared the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Affleck will play Michael Banks and Damon, J. Gordon Cooney, two lawyers at a Philadelphia firm who work pro bono on the appeal of John Thompson, who claims he was wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The attorneys manages to win nine stays of execution over the next decade and a half and eventually overturn the conviction and have Thompson cleared of all charges.
The film, which will be distributed by Disney’s Touchstone Pictures division, is being produced by Affleck and Damon’s Live Planet shingle. Chris Murphey has been tapped to write the script. As part of the movie deal, the companies acquired the life-story rights to the attorneys and Thompson for an unspecified sum.
Live Planet is the multimedia outfit that hatched Damon and Affleck’s now-scotched reality series Project Greenlight. It’s also developing for Miramax Gone Baby Gone, the story of two Beantown private detectives investigating a girl’s kidnapping. The film is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane and is expected to mark Affleck’s feature directing debut.
That project is scheduled to start shooting this summer in Boston. No word when Affleck and Damon will roll cameras on the death row story.
Besides Gone, Affleck has three more movies in the pipeline: playing an assassin in Joe Carnahan’s Las Vegas crime comedy Smoking Aces, going up, up and away as original Superman actor George Reeves in the mystery Hollywoodland, and appearing in Smith’s highly anticipated sequel Clerks II.
Damon, who’s currently in theaters in Syrnana, has been in the Dominican Republic shooting Robert De Niro’s CIA film The Good Shepherd, costarring De Niro and Angelina Jolie. This December he stars with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson in Martin Scorsese’s crime drama The Departed. He’s also signed on to reprise his role as Jason Bourne for The Bourne Ultimatum and is likely to be in the cast of Ocean’s 13, if the sequel gets off the drawing board.
With news of their legal drama circulating, Damon and Affleck can finally put aside the rumors spread by OK! magazine that the actors were ready to take over the roles immortalized by Paul Newman and Robert Redford in 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
“There’s no truth, never was,” Affleck’s rep, Ken Sunshine, tells E! Online. “Never any thought about Butch Cassidy, never any meetings about it. It’s just not true.”
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