Back in 2022, David Mamet set out to make a movie about the JFK assassination with the implication that Chicago mobster Sam Giancana had something to do with it. By 2023, he was no longer directing Assassination, ceding those duties to Barry Levinson, but he was still going to write the film with Giancana’s grandnephew Nicholas Celozzi. Al Pacino, Viggo Mortensen, Rebecca Pidgeon, Shia LaBeouf, John Travolta, and Courtney Love were set to star in the film that, believe it or not, now sounds dead in the water.
This is according to a new interview Mamet and LaBeouf gave to The Hollywood Reporter, published today. “I was prepping to play Lee Harvey Oswald. Viggo Mortensen signed on. We were ready to go,” LaBeouf says. “Then I get a heartfelt call from Dave, and I never heard him sound like that. It was like heartbreak. Somebody took his kid from him. I don’t know really what happened, but I know that they pushed him out.”
When directly asked what happened to the movie, Mamet describes what sounds like a legal version of the Spider-men pointing at each other meme. “They decided that instead of making the movie, they wanted to sue each other,” the writer says. “So they started suing each other. Everybody was in it. Courtney Love was in it. John Travolta. Al Pacino.” He adds, presumably glumly, “Louis C.K. was going to play Jack Ruby.”
There were indeed some very messy legal proceedings related to the film, which apparently originated when Celozzi filed a lawsuit against 308 US, the film’s finance and production company, Deadline reported in February. A major sticking point for Celozzi was the hiring of Levinson as the director instead of Mamet, and that Levinson’s changes to the script were not accurate. The trade reported at the time that all of the cast stepped back, with the exception of Pacino. Deadline also reported that there were still plans to start production in mid-2025; if that’s still the plan, it sounds like it’ll be without LaBeouf or Mamet.
