Fox Searchlight has acquired North American and UK rights to Robert Redford‘s heist thriller “Old Man and the Gun.”
The Endgame Entertainment production just wrapped in Cincinnati, Ohio. The film is written and directed by David Lowery (“Pete’s Dragon”) based on a short story by David Grann for The New Yorker, published in 2003.
The film also stars Casey Affleck, Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, Tom Waits and Tika Sumpter. Producers are Endgame Entertainment’s James D. Stern, Condé Nast Entertainment’s Dawn Ostroff and Jeremy Steckler, Wildwood Enterprises, Identity Films’ Anthony Mastromauro, Sailor Bear’s Toby Halbrooks and James M. Johnston and Bill Holderman.
Executive producers on the film are Julie Goldstein, Lucas Smith, Patrick Newall and Tango Entertainment’s Tim Headington.
Redford portrays Forrest Tucker, who escaped from San Quentin at the age of 70 and pulled off an unprecedented string of heists that confounded authorities. Affleck plays a detective who becomes captivated with Tucker’s commitment to his craft and Spacek plays his romantic interest.
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Part of Grann’s story includes this passage about Tucker’s arrest in 1999:
“The police were stunned when they realized that the man they had apprehended was not only seventy-eight years old—he looked, according to Chinn, ‘as if he had just come from an Early Bird Special’—but one of the most notorious stickup men of the twentieth century. Over a career that spanned more than six decades, he had also become perhaps the greatest escape artist of his generation, a human contortionist who had broken out of nearly every prison he was confined in.”
The deal was brokered by Fox Searchlight’s Ray Strache and Megan O’Brien with WME and CAA with Stern on behalf of Endgame.
The film is overseen by Fox Searchlight’s Matthew Greenfield, David Greenbaum, Anikah McLaren and Taylor Friedman.
