After taking home the Best Picture Oscar for Argo last month, Ben Affleck is reuniting with Warner Bros. for his next film, Live By Night. And it looks like he’ll be working with them once more to adapt the upcoming book, Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution.
Written by Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill is due to be published at the end of next month, with the studio acquiring the rights in a high six-figure against seven-figure deal to bring it to the big screen, Deadline report.
The book has been acquired for Pearl Street Films, with Ben Affleck eyeing it as a potential directing vehicle. It’s thought that Affleck is setting Chris Terrio, who also earned an Oscar last month for his Argo script, to pen the Bunker Hill script. And Affleck and Terrio working together once more is definitely something we’d love to see.
Courtesy of Amazon, here’s the synopsis for Philbrick’s upcoming book.
Boston in 1775 is an island city occupied by British troops after a series of incendiary incidents by patriots who range from sober citizens to thuggish vigilantes. After the Boston Tea Party, British and American soldiers and Massachusetts residents have warily maneuvered around each other until April 19, when violence finally erupts at Lexington and Concord. In June, however, with the city cut off from supplies by a British blockade and Patriot militia poised in siege, skirmishes give way to outright war in the Battle of Bunker Hill. It would be the bloodiest battle of the Revolution to come, and the point of no return for the rebellious colonists.
Philbrick brings a fresh perspective to every aspect of the story. He finds new characters, and new facets to familiar ones. The real work of choreographing rebellion falls to a thirty-three year old physician named Joseph Warren who emerges as the on-the-ground leader of the Patriot cause and is fated to die at Bunker Hill. Others in the cast include Paul Revere, Warren’s fiancé the poet Mercy Scollay, a newly recruited George Washington, the reluctant British combatant General Thomas Gage and his more bellicose successor William Howe, who leads the three charges at Bunker Hill and presides over the claustrophobic cauldron of a city under siege as both sides play a nervy game of brinkmanship for control.
With passion and insight, Philbrick reconstructs the revolutionary landscape—geographic and ideological—in a mesmerizing narrative of the robust, messy, blisteringly real origins of America.
Terrio’s Argo script is one of the finest we’ve loved in recent years, and Affleck did an amazing job at the helm. So naturally, we’re very interested to see how Bunker Hill develops.
Affleck is currently working on his next feature, Live By Night, which sees him returning to the work of Dennis Lehane, having brought Lehane’s novel, Gone Baby Gone, to the big screen in his directorial debut.
Bunker Hill would see Affleck return to his native Boston, and the project has instantly become one of my most anticipated in development. This is definitely something we’ll be keeping an eye on. More as we get it.
