Legendary screenwriter and occasional director David Mamet is set to return to the director’s chair to helm 2 Days/1963, a drama scripted by Nicholas Celozzi that purports to tell how his great uncle, notorious Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, arranged the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as revenge for trying to bring down organized crime.
Mamet, the twice Oscar-nominated scribe and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, will reportedly do a rewrite on Celozzi’s script. Celozzi will unsurprisingly produce the film himself through his Monaco Films banner.
The drama will focus on previously untold events that took place during the 48 hours before the assassination of America’s 35th president in November 1963. Some of Celozzi’s information comes from his late Uncle Pepe — Giancana’s brother — who, Celozzi claims, told him about the mob’s complicity in the killing.
The story will unveil the mob’s version of the assassination/payback for JFK’s snubbing of Giancana after he helped get Kennedy elected, and for Robert Kennedy‘s investigation into and attempt to dismantle organized crime.
The mob theory was part of what director Oliver Stone presented in his 1991 film JFK, which focused on findings by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison that contradicted the lone gunman conclusion by the Warren Commission. Stone recently released the documentary JFK: Destiny Betrayed that analyzed recently declassified documents about the assassination.
Mamet’s own skepticism was reportedly reawakened by Celozzi’s script. Mamet said in a statement:
“Nick wrote and sent me this script, and it’s a helluva script. Really inside stuff, similar to what Francis Coppola did with Mario Puzo in The Godfather. That’s the great American film, but it’s got very little to do with the book. What’s The Godfather really about? Francis Coppola and Mario Puzo sitting around a kitchen table and telling the stories they overheard of their grandparents.
That’s why we love that movie, it reeks of being inside, of family and cultural myths presented like gossip. It’s the stuff Nick heard around the kitchen table from the people who knew. It’s incredibly yummy. It made me say, I would love to make this movie, and here we are.”
Mamet at the helm of a JFK assassination movie should have cinephiles salivating. He’s previously written films such as Glengarry Glen Ross, Wag The Dog, The Spanish Prisoner, Hannibal, and Heist. He also has experience writing about organized crime’s connection to politics, having penned Danny DeVito‘s 1992 film Hoffa.
There will always be interest in different stories about what may have happened on that fateful day in November of 1963, so expect 2 Days/1963 to capture some attention. Production on the film is expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2022 in Los Angeles and Dallas.
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