Hoping he will bring the same actor-y dignity to a controversial figure that he previously brought to Jack Kevorkian and Phil Spector, ICM has attached Al Pacino to star in a movie based on late Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, Deadline reports. The project—which we'll pretend could end up being a feature film, even though HBO has already carved out a monopoly on Pacino-as-controversial-figure movies—will be based on Joe Posnanski's current bestseller Paterno, and tell the story of how he became the most successful coach in college football history and then, um, some other stuff happened that he'd rather not talk about. As Deadline puts it, the narrative arc that would provide the framework for Pacino doing lots of yelling is obvious, seeing as "Shakespeare himself would have had trouble coming up with anything this shocking."(Primarily because in Shakespeare's time, they didn't have showers.) Fortunately for the project, Pacino has played blind before.
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