According to THR, George Clooney has set his sights on his next project, a drug smuggling film called Coronado High.
Clooney will produce the film along with Grant Heslov (The Monuments Men) and David Klawans (Argo). Grey’s Anatomy and The West Wing writer Debora Cahn will pen the screenplay, which is an adaptation of a Atavist article by Joshua Bearman. The piece told of a hippie teacher who teamed up with high school students in the beach town of Coronado, California in 1969 to smuggle pot from Mexico to the US by swimming and paddling surfboards. They successfully created a criminal empire that stretched into the 1970s, before being taken down by the DEA.
This isn’t the first of Bearman’s articles to get the Hollywood treatment. He wrote a story for Wired that became the basis for Ben Affleck’s Academy Award winning film Argo. Cahn, on the other hand, even adapted a Barton Gellman Washington Post article called Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency into a Black List script titled The Special Program. So, with their writing chops and Clooney’s knack for developing real-life tales like The Monuments Men, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Good Night, And Good Luck, it looks like Coronado High is in good hands.
There’s no word on whether or not Clooney will act in the film or direct it, though his resume suggests he’ll at least do one of them. We’ll keep you posted on Coronado High as it develops.
Originally published July 15, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
