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QuoteDisplay MoreDeadline is reporting that
[quote='','Deadline.com']"Paramount Pictures has set Chap Taylor to script a drama inspired by the 1962 John Ford-directed Western classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which starred John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Lee Marvin. In the original, Stewart played an idealistic lawyer who tries to bring the rule of law to a lawless frontier town. Marvin played Valance, an outlaw headed for a showdown after the lawyer stands up to him. Wayne played a gunslinger who tries to teach the lawyer to defend himself.
The version that Taylor is writing follows the essentials of that story but is set in New York City in 1991, at the height of the crack cocaine scourge when the murder rate in the city soared to unprecedented levels. A young college-educated black policeman volunteers to be stationed in Harlem to make things safer. He’s teamed with a veteran Irish-American cop who, Taylor said, “has the best of intentions and not the best of methods. It becomes about the sacrifices that had to be made to get from where they were then to where we are now.”
Taylor said the inspiration was time he spent in NYC then to go to NYU Film School and when he worked as bouncer and bartender in Greenwich Village and got a closeup view of a meanness in the city.
“It was the height of the crack war and when organized crime was breaking down and its control over the heroin trade left everyone fighting for their corner,” he said. “The choice was to crack enough skulls that…
