Legendary actor Al Pacino may soon portray a legendary coach, according to deadline.com. The website reports Pacino is attached to play Joe Paterno in a biopic that is currently being pitched around Hollywood.
The film would be based on the biography Paterno by Joe Posnanski. Deadline reports Pacino’s manager, Rick Nicita, will produce.
Posnanski’s biography hit bookstores last August and quickly hit the top of the New York Times Bestseller list. The book follows Paterno in the months leading up to and after his firing in the midst of the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Posnanski started working on the book months before the Sandusky allegations of child-sex abuse surfaced and was given access to Paterno all the way up to his death in January.
An excerpt from Paterno:
This is the story of a man named Joe Paterno, who in his long life was called moral and immoral, decent and scheming, omniscient and a figurehead, hero and fraud, Saint Joe and the devil. A life, of course, cannot be reduced to a single word, but Joe Paterno had something bold and soaring in his personality that attracted extremes. That boldness compelled him to do remarkable and unprecedented things. That boldness also led people to say that, at the end, his failures destroyed whatever good he had done.
Paterno died of complications from lung cancer on January 22 at the age of 85. Sandusky, Paterno’s former assistant, was later found guilty of 45 counts of abuse against 10 different children.
Pacino is no stranger to the gridiron. He played a fictional football coach in Oliver Stone's 1999 film Any Given Sunday.
TMZ reports the Paterno film is in the early stages of development and will be shopped around Hollywood early next week.
