i've come to realize [not recently] that my true love of movie-genres are period-piece types, or films otherwise based on historical truth, that, as they say, is stranger than fiction.
there are a ton of true-life stories out there that should be made into movies. stories that most people don't know about, but are amazingly outrageous.
either in documentary form, or as your standard feature film, what sort of stories do you guys know about that you think would make great movies?
i recently read an article about these fuckers from MIT. maybe you watched it on television or read it too. anyways, it's about how some math geeks from MIT started coming up with amazingly-precise ways of counting cards, then going to vegas in teams to play blackjack and walking out of casinos with hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars throughout the 1990's. what sucks [for me, i wanted to make it!] is that mgm already bought the rights, based on this book.
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then there's michael larsen, who's similar story of gambling took a far more twisted and pathetic fate. back in the early 1980's, ice cream truck driver michael larsen became obssessed with the game show press your luck. so much, in fact, that he would videotape each show, watch them over and over, and he soon realized that the supposedly "random" lights circling the game board were not random, but actually a pattern.
in 1984 he got lucky and became a contestant, and in a single show, the motherfucker racked up over $110,000.
not long after, he lost all his money in a bad investment deal, and also losing 40,000 one-dollar bills which was stolen from his home. and it's fucking sad how the name of the show was so fucking ominous.
i would love to see bill murray play this guy [he was supposed to, but the idea fell through].
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and this guy, joe kittinger, would make a great short-subject docu.
during the early 1960's, nasa and the united states air force collaborated in human-aeronautic testing. they wanted to find out if astronauts could bail-out of spacecraft and survive. so they got this guy named joe to get in a balloon that would go up 102,000 feet [20 miles] into the air, er... space, and jump out.
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also, buster keaton would make great bio-pic material.
Yeah, I wanted to make that book into a movie too. What disappointed me more than the rights being bought up was the fact that the awesome title was already sullied with a shit-hole movie starring Queen Latifah last year. Dammit Steve Martin, what the hell were you thinking???
But yeah, seriously, I'd love to be the director-for-hire that gets to do that book...