Warren Beatty's new film is about Howard Hughes

By Sean O'Neal | June 23, 2011 | 3:07pm

Aux Features Film

Warren Beatty’s return to filmmaking has been revealed to be a film about Howard Hughes, famed business magnate turned urine archivist, and a role that Beatty has been hoping to play for years now. Beatty’s take isn’t a true biopic; it focuses mostly on an affair Hughes had in his later years with a younger woman, when the ladies couldn’t help but be seduced by a bedraggled hermit who smelled of antiseptic. And because this is Beatty’s big comeback, he’s going all out with the supporting cast: Among the names rumored to join are Jack Nicholson, Annette Bening (of course), Shia La Beouf, Andrew Garfield, Rooney Mara, Evan Rachel Wood, and Alec Baldwin. Baldwin, of course, is a veteran of Howard Hughes films, as he also had a co-starring role in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator.

And between that movie recounting Hughes’ early years, and Beatty’s film picking up in his later days, Hughes’ story will be just about covered now—although, as Vulture found out back in February, Christopher Nolan was hoping to make his long-gestating Howard Hughes film finally, right after The Dark Knight Rises, one that would pick up after Hughes had become the reclusive, codeine-and-Banana Ripple-abusing billionaire of popular imagination. Still, Nolan had an entire decade to get it done, when Warren Beatty wasn’t doing anything besides bugging Annette Bening about how to work the TiVo, so Nolan can’t be too mad at him, really.