Ron Howard is going drug smuggling, or at least he’s going to make a movie about it. Over the weekend Universal beat out Sony and spent $1 million on Gary Spinelli’s spec script Mena, which comes with Howard attached to helm, according to Deadline.
The film ‘is a fact-based tale about Barry Seal, a portly pilot who, in the 1980s, was a 300-pound gun runner, and drug trafficker who transported contraband for the CIA and the Medellin cartel. He was eventually shot to death by the latter in Baton Rouge. The title refers to Mena, Arkansas, where a lot of the illegal activity took place, under the noses of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.’
There’s no news on when it might shoot. The Mena deal already has some suggesting 2014 might be a good year for those hawking spec scripts, after several very lean years.