#The Departed Screenwriter is Writing a New Jonah Hill TV Show – /Film

Jonah Hill is heading back to television.

After doing a brief cameo in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm last year, Hill has taken a starring role in an untitled series from William Monahan, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Departed. Hill will play real-life Hollywood fixer Sidney Korshak, who had strong ties to the Chicago mob and deep connections in the entertainment industry – including Lew Wasserman, one of the most powerful studio executives in history. This limited series appears to focus on their relationship and tell at least part of the story of how they were able to attain such incredible power in post-war Hollywood.

Deadline reports that Jonah Hill (21 Jump Street, The Wolf of Wall Street) has signed on to play Sidney Korshak in a new series created by William Monahan, whose other writing credits include films like Kingdom of Heaven, Body of Lies, the 2014 remake of The Gambler, and the upcoming Ben Affleck/George Clooney drama The Tender Bar. The project is reportedly aiming to have the “epic sweep of Scorsese films,” with The Departed and The Irishman singled out as reference points. Here’s how Deadline describes the key players in this story:

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.

Wasserman helped create the star system in Hollywood, and later pioneered the concept of “packaging,” the practice of grouping a director, writer, and/or star from the same agency and trying to get a studio to finance a movie or show based on that foundation. (The idea of packaging was at the center of the most recent fracas between the Writers Guild of America and Hollywood agencies.) Korshak worked with Wasserman and also rubbed shoulders with mobsters like Al Capone, entertainers like Frank Sinatra, Hugh Hefner, and Warren Beatty, and politicians like Ronald Reagan. Despite some unsavory connections, he was never convicted of any crime.

This marks a return to TV for Hill, who was one of two lead actors in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s excellent-but-underseen Netflix series Maniac, which took place across multiple settings and time periods and allowed Hill to stretch his limits as a performer.

This show does not have a home yet, but will be shopped to prospective buyers shortly.

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