EXCLUSIVE: Jonah Hill and William Monahan are team on a limited series that will tell the complicated story of Hollywood fixer Sidney Korshak and Lew Wasserman, the MCA chairman who was the most powerful man in Hollywood. Hill will play Korshak and Monahan will create the series. The package will be shopped shortly. The aim is for it to have the epic sweep of Scorsese films like The Irishman and The Departed, the latter of which won Monahan the Academy Award.
Wasserman was the visionary who in the 1940s liberated actors from film studio control by creating the modern talent agency, and then straddled both lines until the government made him choose and Wasserman shed talent representation for producing. Wasserman’s empire building was abetted by Korshak, an attorney now famous for providing a bridge between organized crime and Hollywood.
Hill and his Strong Baby partners Matt Dines and Ali Goodwin will Executive Produce with LBI/Expanded Media and Monahan. Mark Canton (Power/PowerUniverse) and Celebrands CEO Allen Shapiro will also be executive producers. They’ve optioned the Dennis McDougal book The Last Mogul, on Wasserman, and McDougal, will also be exec producer. Additional source material for the series includes unreported information from Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Jeff Gerth.
Package will be shopped shortly. Stay tuned.