The project first announced in April, Columbia Pictures’ Coronado High has scored a writer in “Grey’s Anatomy” scribe Debora Cahn. The Hollywood Reporter brings word that Cahn will adapt Joshuah Bearman’s article of the same name for George Clooney to produce and potentially direct.
Bearman, whose work also served as the basis for Ben Affleck’s Argo, has his original article available in full at The Atavist with the following official description:
Nobody wouldve figured the kids from the sleepy beach town of Coronado, California, for criminal masterminds. They were just some hippie surfers, high school friends whod come up with the idea of swimming bundles of marijuana across the border from Tijuana during the summer of 1969. Within a decade, however, the Coronado Company had become the largest pot-smuggling operation on the West Coast, a $100 million empire with outposts from Mexico to Morocco to Thailand. And sitting at the top of it all was the most improbable of kingpins: Lou Villar, a former Spanish teacher and swimming coach at Coronado High School.
Drawing on exclusive interviews with Villar and his partners in crime, Joshuah Bearmanauthor of the Wired article that became the film Argotells the inside story of the Coronado Companys unlikely rise and the intrepid DEA agents who brought its principals to justice. Coronado High is an epic saga of daring escapades, hedonistic excess, and friendships betrayed, played out across the era when the innocence of the Summer of Love curdled into the paranoia of the drug war.
Clooney is producing alongside Grant Heslov and David Klawans.
