EXCLUSIVE: Terence Winter, the master of the gangster genre known for his work on The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire and more, is teaming with Academy Award-nominated producer Rachel Winter (Dallas Buyers Club) to develop a feature adaptation of A Murder in Hollywood: The Untold Story of Tinseltown’s Most Shocking Crime.
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Marking the latest work of non-fiction from New York Times bestselling author Casey Sherman, the book optioned by the Winters chronicles the deadly love affair between screen legend Lana Turner and her gangster boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato. It’ll be published through Sourcebooks early next year. Terence Winter will script the screen adaptation and produce through his Cold Front Pictures banner, alongside Rachel Winter through her Tangerine Pictures shingle.
The option marks just the latest high-profile deal for the prolific Sherman, whose bestseller 12: The Inside Story of Tom Brady’s Fight for Redemption, co-written with Dave Wedge, has been picked up for development as a scripted limited series by Oscar nominees Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson (The Fighter), as we told you first last week.
A Murder in Hollywood‘s subject, Turner, is of course the starlet known for roles in films like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Imitation of Life, whose career took off at MGM in the 1940s. She became romantically entangled with Cohen crime family enforcer Stompanato while at a professional low point in the late 1950s, and her dynamic with him proved turbulent, culminating in the stabbing death of Stompanato in 1958. Taking him down, inside Turner’s Beverly Hills home, was her teenage daughter Cheryl Crane, who was exonerated after shedding light on the domestic abuse that prompted her to action. Stompanato’s family sued Turner for $750,000 in the aftermath, though the settlement that followed was for just $20,000.
Said Terence and Rachel Winter today in a joint statement, “In his stunning new book A Murder in Hollywood, Casey Sherman takes us behind the glitz and glamor of 1950s Technicolor to a front row seat at a real-life film noir, the story of Lana Turner and her terrifying love affair with gangster Johnny Stompanato. It’s a violent and harrowing tale of female empowerment, a page-turner more gripping than any film in which she ever starred.”
“A Murder in Hollywood reveals how Lana Turner took her life back from Stompanato and LA crime boss Mickey Cohen,” noted Sherman, adding that, “for decades, Turner has been wrongly described as a Hollywood femme fatale, when in reality, she was a feminist icon and a true pioneer of the #metoo movement.”
A notorious figure, portrayed a decade ago by James Carpinello in Ruben Fleischer’s LA crime pic Gangster Squad, Stompanato’s most notable depiction on screen would have to be in the Oscar-winning Curtis Hanson classic L.A. Confidential, which had Paolo Seganti portraying the mobster opposite Brenda Bakke’s Turner. In addition to the 1990 neo-noir novel from James Ellroy that served as its source material, he notably came up in Ellroy’s book The Big Nowhere, published two years earlier.
As we told you first earlier this year, a TV adaptation of A Murder in Hollywood is also in the works, to be scripted by Devotion scribe Jake Crane, who optioned small-screen rights.
Perhaps best known for his Emmy-winning work as the writer and executive producer of the seminal HBO mob series The Sopranos, Terence Winter also created and served as showrunner of the acclaimed HBO series Boardwalk Empire, which looked at mob activity in Prohibition-era Atlantic City. He scored an Oscar nomination for his writing on Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street and further underscored his credentials as one of the great tellers of the gangster tale while serving for one season as writer and showrunner of the Sylvester Stallone-led Paramount+ drama, Tulsa King.
Most famously producing the late Jean-Marc Vallée’s Oscar-winning drama Dallas Buyers Club, starring Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, Winter’s wife Rachel most recently teamed with LeBron James to produce the Uni basketball feature Shooting Stars, which this summer emerged as Peacock’s most-watched original feature. Her directing credits include The Space Between, starring Kelsey Grammer, and the starry, scripted podcast series, Supreme: The Battle for Roe.
The bestselling author of 17 books, Sherman is best known for titles like The Finest Hours and Boston Strong, which were adapted for the big screen by Disney and CBS Films, respectively. His book Helltown, about a serial murder case on Cape Cod, is currently in development at Amazon, with Academy Award-winner Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front) on board to direct, Oscar Isaac locked for the role of author Kurt Vonnegut and Team Downey set to produce.
Terence and Rachel Winter are represented by CAA, LBI Entertainment and attorney Robert S. Getman at Jackoway Austen Tyerman. Sherman is repped by UTA, The Gotham Group and attorney Joel VanderKloot.
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