While Jake Gyllenhaal is often pictured at basketball games, it appears he’s got a soft spot for babseball and American football too. For quite a while he’s been attached to a remake of the baseball-themed musical Damn Yankees (yeah, I’m kind of intrigued to see him singing too) and now it appears there’s movement on a project he lined himself up for a couple of years ago – a biopic about ‘Broadway’ Joe Namath, the legendary New York Jets quarterback, who took American football by storm in the 60s and 70s.
Most had assumed the biopic had descended into development hell, never to return, as nothing has been heard about it for ages, but now Pajiba reports that Girl, Interrupted and Walk The Line director James Mangold is sniffing around the project. While Mangold had been working his way up the Hollywood tree for well over a decade now, his status took a big jump when Cameron Diaz and Tom Cruise signed up for his action-comedy Knight & Day, which will be released this summer.
However questions still remain over when the film will actually get made. Mangold has several other films in the works, such as a feature based on the documentary Murderball and a Dusty Springfield biopic, and it’s not known what movie he’s actually going to make next. Universal is apparently preparing to give the Namath script a dusting (possibly by Mangold, who’s also a screenwriter), before giving it the greenlight.
Namath is seen by many as the first rock star sportsman, known for his wild ways both on and off the pitch. He also publicly admitted an alcohol problem, played while having knees so bad doctors wouldn’t clear him to go to Vietman and appeared in a string of TV commercials and advertisements (something that was rare for a sportsman at the time).
He’s the sort of figure who’s going to get a biopic at some point, with the question mainly being whether it’ll star Gyllenhaal with Mangold behind the lens.