Now that indie producer Rachel Winter finally got the long-gestating drama Dallas Buyers Club in front of audiences and critics that are adoring it, she can focus her attention on another oft-delayed project in production with a pretty solid cast of its own. The drama Stealing Cars, with Mark Wahlberg and Steve Levinson executive producing, will star William H. Macy, John Leguizamo, Felicity Huffman, Mike Epps, Emory Cohen and Paul Sparks. I’d have to steal a bunch of cars to be able to get these guys to make my movie.
The film will be directed by Bradley Kaplan, best known for directing the episode "Muhammad and Larry" for ESPN’s documentary series 30 for 30, with a script written by Will Aldis and Steve Mackall, who last teamed up for 2002’s completely forgettable Avenging Angelo with Sylvester Stallone. Hopefully they can turn a better tale out of the true story that Stealing Cars is based on.
Cohen, best known for his work on this year’s masterful drama The Place Beyond the Pines, will play a cocky and rebellious teenager responsible for a tragic car accident that gets him sent off to juvenile detention, where he will face harsh injustices and vicious battles, but also find friendships that remind him life is worth living and that he is capable of forgiving himself.
It kind of sounds like Matthew Ryan Hope’s The United States of Leland, just piled under a lot of schmaltz and missing Ryan Gosling and Don Cheadle. But I can’t assume Winter would continue trying to make a movie that wasn’t original and amazing some 14 years after she’d initially began working on it. Plus, Cohen is an impressive young actor, and the rest of this cast usually chooses moving projects to work on.
Indie legend Macy has been keeping busy on Showtime’s Shameless and this year starred in the comedy Trust Me with Huffman and the hunter thriller A Single Shot. He’ll next star in Two-Bit Waltz, the directorial debut from David Mamet’s daughter Clara. Huffman also stars with Macy in the grieving father drama Rudderless, and will star with Samuel L. Jackson in the action adventure Big Game next year.
The always busy Leguizamo starred in the comedy Fugly! this year, along with the irreverent comic book actioner Kick-Ass 2. He’ll next be seen in the action comedy Ride Along and Jon Favreau’s foodie comedy Chef. Epps, who appeared in The Hangover III, will soon be seen as Richard Pryor in the Nina Simone biopic Nina.
Cohen, who also starred in the musical TV drama Smash, will next star in the period drama Brooklyn. And Boardwalk Empire’s Sparks, who is also in Trust Me, can be seen in the historical drama Parkland and the upcoming comedy A Bear Lands on Earth.
The project is currently in production in New York.
