Per Deadline, Seth Rogen and Elle Fanning are in talks to join the cast of Chippendales, a film about the titular 1980s male strip club that will star Dev Patel and is being directed by Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya, Cruella).
Lauren Blum and Rebecca Angelo are rewriting the script after Craig Williams and Isaac Adamson penned previous drafts. David Permut, who has been trying to get the project made for two decades, will produce. If the deals close, it will be a mini-reunion for Rogen and Gillespie, who just wrapped production on the Pam & Tommy series that will hit Hulu in February.
The film will revolve around Somen ‘Steve’ Banerjee, an Indian-American entrepreneur who purchased a Los Angeles nightclub in the 80s called Destiny II, before quickly transforming it into Chippendales.
He co-founded the club with career grifter Paul Snider and attorney Bruce Nahin, with Snider’s wife, Playboy model Dorothy Stratten, helping design the famous cuff and collar uniforms for the dancers.
Chippendales went on to become a multi-million dollar organization, with revenue flowing in from club shows, calendar sales, and touring performances. But violence soon creeped in, with Snider killing Stratten in a murder-suicide in 1980 – the subject of Bob Fosse‘s Star 80 – while Banerjee became entangled in plots to kill two of his former partners and two former Chippendales dancers.
He pleaded guilty to a number of charges in the early 1990s, but was found hanging in his jail cell on the morning of his sentencing in an apparent suicide.
It’s not confirmed, but Deadline’s sources believe that Rogen would play Nick De Noia, the choreographer who came up with Chippendales routine, while Fanning would play Stratten.
As mentioned, Rogen will next be seen in Pam & Tommy, before following that up with a role in Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans. He’s also set to be the voice of Donkey Kong in the in-development Mario film.
Season two of Fanning’s Hulu series The Great premiered a few weeks ago, and she has another Hulu series in the works titled The Girl From Plainville, based on the true story of Michelle Carter, the high school girl accused of talking her boyfriend into committing suicide.
Fanning will also star alongside her sister Dakota in Mélanie Laurent‘s The Nightingale, currently in the works.
After years of Permut and others trying to get a film based on the Chippendales saga into production, it looks like this one might have the legs to finally get made. We’ll wait and see if any other big names sign on for what is certainly one of the darker stranger-than-fiction stories.
#Peace.Love.Chippendales
