Nick Cassavetes—director behind sentimental sap like The Notebook and My Sister’s Keeper, as well as darker fare such as Alpha Dog—is in talks to direct a new biopic about reformed mobster John Gotti Jr. Rather than a standard mob drama, Gotti says the script he’s been working on with actor and screenwriter Leo Rossi is more a story about his relationship with his late father, the flamboyant “Dapper Don” (and later, “Teflon Don”) of the Gambino crime family, and his own path to redemption after Gotti visited his father in prison and told him he was ending his life of crime. The elder Gotti, of course, spent the last 10 years of his life in prison before dying of cancer in 2002. A son confronting the sins of his family, the moral that crime doesn’t pay, a father dying of cancer—with built-in clichés like these, Cassavetes should have a field day.
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