According to Deadline, Jack Black will produce and star in The Man Who Would Be Polka King, a movie about the polka musician named Jan Lewan who “unwittingly brought a town to its knees in a Ponzi scheme.” Black’s film will be based on Joshua Brown and John Mikulak’s documentary of the same name, but it’ll now have the added benefit of Jack Black’s unique brand of zany energy. The real Jan Lewan may not have screamed and done karate moves very often, but that’s why people turn documentaries into normal movies. It lets them add the stuff that’s missing from real life.
Anyway, the gist of Lewan’s story is that he was born in Poland, he moved to America in the ‘80s, and he eventually became a Grammy-nominated musician. At some point, he started buying cheap souvenirs on trips back to Poland that he would then sell to his fans for more money, “turning a major profit.” To make more money, though, Deadline explains that he “started offering unregistered promissory notes at guaranteed 12 percent interest,” which is a fancy way of saying that he took money from people and told them he’d give them more money in return, but a series of setbacks prevented him from ever actually doing that. He declared bankruptcy and later went to jail for “fleecing millions of dollars from investors in multiple states.”
This movie will presumably follow that basic story, but with more screaming and karate moves.