Al Pacino To Play Joe Paterno In Movie On Penn State Gridiron Scandal
 

Al Pacino To Play Joe Paterno In Movie On Penn State Gridiron Scandal
By MIKE FLEMING Friday September 7, 2012 @ 2:38pm PDT

EXCLUSIVE: ICM Partners next week will be taking a package for a movie about former Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno, with Al Pacino attached to play the man called JoePa by most students at Happy Valley. The package will be built around Joe Posnanski’s biography Paterno, which is now atop The New York Times Bestseller List in its second week. Pacino’s manager, Rick Nicita, will produce.

The narrative arc of the movie that will be shopped is obvious. A man becomes the winningest coach in college football history and builds a powerhouse football program that turns him into a campus deity. When his former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky is revealed to be a pedophile and it comes out Paterno was told and helped hide the scandal, the coach was summarily fired. He died shortly after of cancer — and many feel of a broken heart — and the school had little choice but to raze a fabled statue of Paterno just as the NCAA dropped the hammer with sanctions against the school that included removal of Paterno’s wins going back to the cover-up. Sandusky was found guilty on 45 counts of sexual abuse against young boys and is expected to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Posnanski, an award-winning sportswriter who has written for Sports Illustrated and The Kansas City Star, had spent a year working on the book when the scandal broke. The book isn’t just about Paterno’s demise but rather his life before Penn State, his family and the iron grip he held over Penn State football and politics until his downfall. This can either be a feature film or a cable movie, because Shakespeare himself would have had trouble coming up with anything this shocking, and because the issues here still boggle the mind.

How could a coach whose mission was to mold college athletes into men and who was revered by his players stand idly by after learning one of his former coaches was a perv who used his charity for underprivileged kids, The Second Mile, to lure young fatherless victims for sexual trysts? An investigation indicated that Paterno used his influence to a degree that police weren’t even called after a graduate assistant (who later became an assistant coach) witnessed Sandusky showering with a minor in the Penn State football facility but told the coach instead of calling the authorities. While Paterno might not have wanted to sully his beloved football program with bad press, this inaction enabled Sandusky to operate unfettered for a decade, ruining young lives in the process.

Pacino played a memorable head football coach in the Oliver Stone-directed Any Given Sunday, and he also played Jack Kevorkian in the HBO film You Don’t Know Jack. I don’t often write about projects before they’re set up, but I doubt this one will stay on the market for long. John Burnham and Jeff Berg rep Pacino at ICM Partners, while the agency’s book czar Sloan Harris reps Posnanski.

I always felt that Ernest Borgnine should have played Lombardi back in the day. That would have been a helluva look-a-like and movie as well. Is he still alive ?

Pacino? I think he is too wired to play Joe. But who knows, it might work.

he's got a GREAT ASS

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lz5ox06EVv1qazeh4.gif

Who's gonna play Sandusky?

Wired? You've seen the Godfather with him as the cool Michael Corleone.

Yup. And he's still very capable of playing that low-key.

I imagine the pregame pep talk going down like in Any Given Sunday...

Sandusky is stacked by the inch children. We claw our fingernails for that inch. We put our hands around his inch! You put his 6 inches in front of your face, then turn around, bend over... Either you hit the showers as a team...or you will die as individual missing children to keep this program a float. Football is life. It's what living is. Now...what are you going to do children?

Richard Gere or Tom Cruise

ROFL

Intense scene between Paterno and Sandusky:

"He's got a great ass, and you got your head all the way up it!"

They hired the guy the "I WANTS SOME BUTTS" guy from Top Gun to play sandusky

Hooah!

Jimmy the Greek.