If you loved L.A. Confidential and The Untouchables, then we're pretty certain that you're going to like Gangster Squad, a new movie that Warner Bros. has just given the green light and which sounds like a cross between the two.
Based on a series of L.A. Times articles by Paul Lieberman that began in 1992, Gangster Squad will tell the story of a LAPD unit that was formed in 1946 to combat the increasingly brazen tactics of the East Coast Mafia as it tried to encroach upon L.A.
The Mafia's tactics included drive-by shootings and shootouts. The LAPD's unit, dubbed the Gangster Squad, responded with brute force, trying to take down the likes of Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen (glimpsed, of course, in L.A. Confidential) by any means necessary. The unit survived well into the 1950s.
But little was known about the unit until a surviving member contacted Lieberman in 1992. It's taken the writer sixteen years to research and write his seven-part L.A. Times series, but it finally concluded last Saturday. Lieberman's articles – which were based on interviews with over 100 subjects – focused on two members of the squad, including one cop who was turfed out of the unit against his will, who were both obsessed with taking down Mickey Cohen.
No writer is yet attached to the project, but Warners has brought on producer Dan Lin to oversee the movie's development. And we'll keep a close eye on this one, as it sounds like it could be a doozy. Isn't that what they said in the Fifties?