David Mamet to direct JFK assassination movie written by grandnephew of mobster Sam Giancana

David Mamet is set to direct a new film retelling the assassination of John F. Kennedy from the mob’s point of view, but rather than just having a bunch of Italian guys watching the news and saying “this is an American tragedy that we had absolutely nothing to do with,” the movie will assert that—dramatic pause—the mob had something to do with it. Specifically, Mamet’s film—2 Days/1963—is operating under the theory that Chicago mobster Sam Giancana arranged Kennedy’s assassination as payback for his attempts to undermine the mob after they helped get him elected (a big part of Oliver Stone’s JFK).

On top of that, the film will have an added layer of (arguable) credibility, with Giancana’s actual grandnephew, Nicholas Celozzi, writing the script (Mamet, who is apparently some sort of accomplished playwright, will be doing a rewrite). This all comes from Deadline, with Celozzi saying that some of his information comes from chats he’d have with his family, like an uncle who was supposedly with Giancana during the two days he was in Dallas orchestrating the assassination and who was “the fly on the wall” during all of it.

Other statements from Celozzi in the Deadline piece read like something a mobster-type would say in a mobster movie, so it’s not especially surprising when Mamet—in a statement of his own—compares the script “to what Francis Coppola did with Mario Puzo in The Godfather” (thereby comparing his mob movie to the greatest and most iconic mob movie of all time). Mamet says that The Godfather isn’t good because it follows the book, it’s good because it captures the feeling of “Francis Coppola and Mario Puzo sitting around a kitchen table and telling the stories they overheard of their grandparents” so it “reeks of being inside, of family, and cultural myths presented like gossip.”

Again, he’s talking about The Godfather, not his movie, but the implication is that 2 Days/1963 will also capture these feelings. The Deadline story mentions that Mamet has been wanting to make a Kennedy assassination movie for years, with one “based on the Zapruder film” that had Cate Blanchett attached a decade ago, so it seems like he’s finally getting a chance to exorcise some mobster thoughts with this.