Hollywood is to return to the rocky, unforgiving terrain of America’s most infamous penitentiary for a prison-escape thriller based on a true story, Battle for Alcatraz, according to US reports.
Paramount has won a bidding war against five other studios to shoot a new story about the infamous island jail, already the subject of classic 1979 Clint Eastwood movie Escape from Alcatraz among others.
The new script centres on a 1946 attempt by six inmates to escape from the prison, which saw the US marines called in to help regain control of the situation. The title Battle for Alcatraz is not hyperbole: the prisoners gained access to a gun gallery shortly after overpowering their captors, and were armed with rifles, pistols, gas grenades and clubs as they fought off attempts to recapture them.
Up-and-coming screenwriters Neil Widener and Gavin James are to write the script for the new film, with Bridge of Spies writer Matt Charman taking a producer’s credit. No casting details are available yet, and the project has no director attached to it thus far.
The battle has previously been dramatised for the big screen on a number of occasions. Film noir Brute Force, starring Burt Lancaster, told a heavily fictionalised version of events in 1947, and Lancaster returned to the rock for John Frankenheimer’s better-known 1962 movie Birdman of Alcatraz, in which the actor’s title character is given unwarranted credit for ending the 1946 battle. Don Siegel’s Eastwood-led Escape from Alcatraz centred on an escape attempt in the early 60s.
Alcatraz is also known as the location for the only Michael Bay-directed movie to achieve a “fresh” rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes: 1996’s The Rock, starring Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris.
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