Wall Street, Wall Street, Wall Street. One little global financial collapse happens and suddenly everyone wants to dissect what happened, or dig out an interesting story about the crash, the fallout or what happened next. George Clooney and producing pal Grant Heslov are looking to cut themselves a little slice of that action, setting up project based on a Washington Post article called The $700 Billion Man.
Post writer Laura Blumenfeld penned the piece in 2009, which profiled Neel Kashkari who helped to develop the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. TARP, as it has since been endlessly referred to across the Pond, essentially used government cash to bail out the big, failing banks.
The pressure on Kashkari was enormous: he rarely saw his wife, was attacked from all sides by politicians and the press and the stress was so great that he ended up quitting and moving to an isolated cabin to try to recover.
Clooney has added it to the pile of potential projects in his big box labelled “Movies I Might Direct/Leftover Free Nespresso Capsules” and has assigned Stranger Than Fiction writer Zach Helm to start cranking out a screenplay. The actor/producer/director, meanwhile, is busy making political drama The Ides of March, which will arrive shortly before he crops up in Alexander Payne’s next film, The Descendants.