We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, Brian DePalma needs a hit. Forget hit, at this point, I’ll settle for a decent film. Two good films (Carlito’s Way and Mission Impossible) since 1989 is not a great track record. DePalma, however, is nothing if not persistent; he will be trying again to remind us that he used to be a relevant director with a movie about the case of the Boston Strangler.
According to HR, DePalma will direct The Boston Stranglers. The movie is based on the book, "The Boston Stranglers: The Public Conviction of Albert DeSalvo and the True Story of Eleven Shocking Murders," by Susan Kelly. Kelly hypothesizes that the 13 murders attributed to the Boston Strangler, committed in the early 1960’s, were not all perpetrated by Albert DeSalvo, who confessed. Although this is not the first major film covering the events, Tony Curtis and Henry Fonda starred in The Boston Strangler in 1968, it will be the first that looks into the possibility that multiple men carried out the murders.
The book is being adapted into a script by Alan Rosen. In a “how’d he get this job” kinda twist, his previous credits are primarily television shows like Head of the Class and Diff’rent Strokes. Not just television shows, really old television shows. We will see if Rosen can make the leap from 80’s sitcoms to movies in the new Millennium and if DePalma can end this lengthy drought.
