Maxance Vincent
S. Craig Zahler has finally announced his latest project, five years after the release of Dragged Across Concrete, with the gangster thriller The Bookie & the Bruiser. Anton will introduce the movie to international distributors during the upcoming Marché du Film at the Cannes Film Festival next week, with production slated to begin during the fourth quarter of the year.
Vince Vaughn and Adrien Brody are slated to star in the picture, with Anthony Katagas producing via his Keep Your Head Productions alongside Dave Caplan. C2 Motion Picture Group is fully financing the project.
Here is the official plot synopsis, per a press release:
“The Bookie & the Bruiser is set in 1959 New York City and features a pensive, Jewish fellow named Rivner and an oversized Italian-American tough named Boscolo from the Lower East Side, both of whom served overseas in World War II and returned changed men who no longer fit inside the lives they’d left behind. Uninterested in taking orders from bosses or playing by the rules of polite society, the two friends partner up as a bookmaker and an enforcer and create an illicit gambling operation that proves to be very profitable, though risky, and their situation gets rather sticky when they find themselves stuck between a powerful Irish gang and the Mafia.”
In a statement, Anton CEO Sébastien Raybaud said, “We are thrilled to be working with the visionary S. Craig Zahler on this action-packed tale of a searing conflict between the Irish-American and Italian Mafias in New York and see Vince and Adrien team up in this very unique power charged film.”
Producer Dave Caplan added to Raybaud’s statement with the following, “I’m honored and humbled to be working with one of my favorite filmmakers. A S. Craig Zahler’s gangster movie is something I’m dying to watch!”
Source: Anton (Press release)
S. Craig Zahler is such a frustrating director for me. His movies always contain an undercurrent of bigotry and toxic macho bravado that are impossible to ignore… but he’s really good at building up tension on a scene-by-scene level.
Agreed. He fascinates and frustrates me in equal measure.
I don’t understand when people say that. Such characters exist and have always existed in this world, and Zahler portrays them with an unprecedented uniqueness. As in every Tarantino movie, the characters are bolstered by their own pasts. For me, S. Craig Zahler is one of the last true auteur directors who are not only very good at developing unique characters and worlds, but also at creating perfectly written stories that are not only able to thrill the audience in an exciting way, to keep them in check, but also always carry a coolness and suspense that simply doesn’t exist in this mix in the movie world anymore. There aren’t even any good auteur filmmakers anymore who don’t always have to be artzy farty. And that’s exactly what Zahler is, a maestro in every field.