Earlier this year screenwriter and occasional director William Monahan made a two-year first-look deal with Paramount, via his Henceforth Pictures banner. The latest possible future project to come out of it is **The Throwaways, a true-crime conspiracy thriller based on a 2012 New Yorker article.
The original New Yorker piece by Sarah Stillman exposed a dodgy practice in which cops enlisted young offenders as informants, sending them off on high-risk assignments with little-to-no back-up. Sometimes the results were fatal, as in the case of Rachel Hoffman, a 23 year-old busted for weed, ecstacy and valium possession, who chose to cooperate with the police rather than face jail. Just three weeks into her assignement she was shot to death after the police lost track of her signal during a deal they had set up. Hers is just one story of many.
It's ground covered recently in Ric Roman Waugh's Snitch, starring Dwayne Johnson as an aggrieved and vengeful father. But you'd assume that Monahan, writer of The Departed and Body Of Lies, is adopting a rather more complex approach to the material.
Monahan will write and produce, but there's no timescale for The Throwaways so far, and no indication that he will necessarily man the cameras. As a director he made his debut with London Boulevard in 2010, and is currently in post-production on the thriller Mojave. That one stars Mark Wahlberg, Garrett Headland, Oscar Isaac and Walton Goggins, and is currently awaiting a release date.