Variety is reporting that Matt Damon has signed on to produce and star in Charlatan, a drama which will see him taking on the role of John R. Brinkley, an early 20th century doctor and con man who fooled his patients into believing that he had discovered the cure to impotence.
The film will be scripted by the writing team of Brian Koppelman and David Levien (Ocean’s Thirteen) and is based upon Pope Brock’s bestselling 2008 non-fiction book Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam. The official description for the book reads as follows:
In 1917, John R. Brinkley–America’s most brazen con man–introduced an outlandish surgical method for restoring fading male virility.
It was all nonsense, but thousands of eager customers quickly made “Dr.” Brinkley one of America’s richest men–and a national celebrity. The great quack buster Morris Fishbein vowed to put the country’ s “most daring and dangerous” charlatan out of business, yet each effort seemed only to spur Brinkley to new heights of ingenuity, and the worlds of advertising, broadcasting, and politics soon proved to be equally fertile grounds for his potent brand of flimflam.
Culminating in a decisive courtroom confrontation, Charlatan is a marvelous portrait of a boundlessly audacious rogue on the loose in an America ripe for the bamboozling.
Next up from Damon is George Clooney’s Suburbicon, which opens in the States on October 27th and in the UK on November 24th [read our review here], followed by Alexander Payne’s Downsizing, which debuts in North America on December 22nd and in the UK on January 19th 2018 [watch the trailer here].
Originally published September 23, 2017. Updated April 17, 2018.
