Sean Penn and Ryan Gosling May Be Signing Up for an L.A. Mob Movie

Tim Grierson
·Editor

When you think of mob movies, the two most common cities that come to mind are New York and Chicago. Los Angeles may not have as many classic movies about organized crime as other American cities, but we've got our fair share of great crime films, everything from "Chinatown" to "L.A. Confidential." Warner Bros. no doubt hopes they've found a great L.A. mob movie in "Tales From the Gangster Squad" -- and they're also hoping Sean Penn and Ryan Gosling agree and decide to sign up for the film.

The film, which might be called "Tales From the Gangster Squad" or simply "Gangster Squad," is based on a multi-part series that ran in the fall of 2008 in the Los Angeles Times that traced the exploits of the LAPD and their battles to corral organized crime in the 1940s and '50s as it made its way to the City of Angels.

After many directors expressed interest in the film adaptation, the job went to Ruben Fleischer, who previously made "Zombieland" and the forthcoming crime comedy "30 Minutes or Less." Warner Bros. wants Penn to play Mickey Cohen, a colleague of Bugsy Siegel who was one of L.A.'s most notorious crime bosses. (He also shows up as a character in "L.A. Confidential.") Gosling would be one of the cops on Cohen's trail.

If "Gangster Squad" moves forward with this personnel, it would represent an interesting pairing of actors who seem exactly right and a director who's never made anything close in temperament to this. As the film's producer, Dan Lin, explained shortly after securing the film rights back in 2008, this is going to be a pretty hard-edged, violent crime movie that's also a mini-history of an emerging metropolis:

"For me, it's a real origin story. It's about these East Coast gangsters falling in love with a girl, and the girl is Los Angeles."

The story also has a tantalizing sense of the blurring of lines between good and bad. "These cops in [the L.A. Times] story, they totally operate in a gray zone, because to get these gangsters they almost had to act like gangsters themselves to take them down. So you get to ask the question -- how far are you willing to go? They really are the unsung heroes. These guys grew up in the Depression, fought in World War II and then risked everything again taking on the likes of Mickey Cohen, who got better press than they did."

Lin's enthusiasm for a film that doubles as an L.A. origin story is understandable, although we do worry about the rest of his quote because, really, hasn't the modern-day crime movie operated under the premise that the good guys and the bad guys are almost indistinguishable? (If it hasn't, then Michael Mann's entire career has been a complete failure.) Of course, those comments were made almost three full years ago, and the story may have evolved since then. And a lot of it will depend on the casting -- getting Penn and Gosling would go a long way toward piquing our interest in this entire project.

In Warner Bros Crime Spree, Studio Eyes Sean Penn For Mickey Cohen, David Yates For Capone Tale [Deadline]
L.A. Times' 'The Gangster Squad' sells to WB: The inside story [The Big Picture/Los Angeles Times]