Friday, May 30, 2014

Johnny Depp in Negotiations to Play Legendary Magician Harry Houdini !



This might be a great news: According to The Hollywood Reporter Johnny Depp is currently in negotiations to play the legendary magician Harry Houdini in Lionsgate's The Secret Life of Houdini. The movie would be directed by Dean Parisot, who did films such Red 2 and Galaxy Quest. Although Johnny Depp will probably soon be back with Pirates of the Caribbean 5 and the sequel to Alice in Wonderland, The Lone Ranger and more recently Transcendence didn't did well at the box office. But playing the role of Harry Houdini is really something in which he would be great, so i hope hell do it.

The story, which is said to be in the vein of Indiana Jones, recasts Houdini as not just a master escape artist but an investigator of the world of the occult. Noah Oppenheim wrote the screenplay, which is based on William Kalush and Larry Sloman's book called The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Real Superhero.

The book dives into some interesting details about Houdini saying that he was a British spy, in cahoots with police organizations, and at one point was even asked to be an adviser to Czar Nicholas II's court in prerevolutionary Russia. Here's the description of the book the film will be inspired by:

Using exclusive access to newly uncovered archives, Kalush and Sloman reveal the clandestine agreements in which the British and Americans recruited Houdini to be an active secret agent. In exchange for his cooperation, the governments of these two countries facilitated his rise to the top of the world stage. The authors give thrilling accounts of his assignments, such as his participation in early aerial surveillance and his use of his own magic magazine to communicate espionage-related information. After the war, Houdini embarked upon what became his most dangerous mission when he took on the Spiritualist movement. Convinced that Spiritualist mediums were frauds, he became obsessed with exposing them. But the Spiritualists were a powerful adversary. An organized network of fanatics, led by Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, worked relentlessly to orchestrate a campaign that would silence Houdini forever. Grounded in solid research, but as exciting and dramatic as a good thriller, The secret life of Houdini traces the magician's long and circuitous route from struggling vaudevillian to worldwide legend.

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