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EXCLUSIVE: Nicholas Celozzi — a co-writer and producer on the Barry Levinson JFK flick Assassination — has filed a lawsuit against the film’s financier and production outfit 308 US.
Originally filed by Celozzi in an LA County court last November, the suit will go before a judge in April who will decide whether the legal action can proceed.
Celozzi, an LA-based producer, accuses 308 of multiple contractual breaches. 308 contests those claims, has filed a motion to dismiss and has provided a comment below.
The suit is messy and largely born out of several complicated production agreements signed before Levinson’s involvement in the project. April’s hearing will be the latest stage in the months-long legal standoff. The meat and potatoes are as follows.
Assassination is the latest incarnation of a project launched by Celozzi about claims that his great uncle, Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, arranged the assassination of President John F Kennedy. Celozzi wrote the first screenplay, titled 2 Days/1963, and set Pulitzer-prize winner David Mamet to direct, after a re-write, in 2022. We broke the news back then. Celozzi and Mamet agreed to share the writing credit.
The filing claims Celozzi and Mamet later hashed out a deal to license the screenplay to 308, which would produce and finance the film with Mamet directing under a $850,000 rights deal. An A-list ensemble, including Al Pacino, John Travolta, Viggo Mortensen, Shia LaBeouf, and Courtney Love was attached to star.
Celozzi’s suit accuses 308 of later firing Mamet as director and replacing him with Levinson without authorization. Celozzi claims the last-minute change was made to halt the project and conceal that 308 and its parent owner Corey Large Group did not have all the money to finance the film. Following this, all of the film’s original cast, excluding Al Pacino, stepped back from the project, according to the filing.
The filing further claims the studio intentionally removed Celozzi’s writing credit on the film from press releases, screenplay copies, and marketing materials. Celozzi argues that 308 and the film’s former sales company Arclight conspired to present Mamet — a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright — as the sole screenwriter to boost international rights sales. Celozzi also contests the historical accuracy of Levinson and 308’s script.
The filing claims that Mamet introduced multiple fictional elements in his rewrites, including a storyline involving the investigative reporter Dorothy Kilgallen. As a result, the suit states that all three parties agreed to split the project’s core story into two separate features, a fictionalized version based on the rewritten screenplay [Assassination] and a second true crime version based on the original screenplay, which Celozzi would develop and produce with another director. The caveat was that 308 could not claim, in promotional material, that their project was the true story of the Giancana crime family’s involvement in JFK’s assassination. Celozzi claims the company breached the demand, which caused “confusion in the marketplace” and impeded his ability to produce his true-crime project.
Levinson and Arclight, which was was previously handling sales on the project, were not immediately available for comment. Pia Patatian’s Cloud9 Studios is now shopping the project and will be taking the film to the upcoming EFM. Celozzi’s legal representatives referred us back to the filing.
In response to our approach, representatives for 308 said Celozzi’s lawsuit is a “pathetic attempt to grab media attention and extract money that is not owed, on a project that the plaintiff had little to do with.”
“The plaintiff has been inexplicably and unsuccessfully trying to sabotage the project for quite some time, and this complaint, full of falsehoods and exaggerations, is in furtherance of that misguided quest,” the rep said to us in a statement.
“The lawsuit is purposefully vague and incomprehensible, and that is because the plaintiff has no case. Plain and simple. The contracts plaintiff attached to the complaint make crystal clear that my client wins the day as a matter of law. We have filed a motion to dismiss this frivolous case, and will be filing counterclaims of our own.”
Celozzi is seeking $1M in damages. Despite the suit, we understand there are ambitions to begin production on the film in the coming months. There’s been some toing and froing on casting. Our latest reporting was that Jared Leto was in talks to star alongside Jessica Chastain, Brendan Fraser, Bryan Cranston, and Al Pacino. The thriller is said to follow a female crime reporter Dorothy Kilgallen (Chastain), who suspects that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in President John F Kennedy’s murder.
Celozzi will also be at EFM with his true crime project titled November 1963: The Killing of a President. Roland Joffé (The Mission) is attached to direct. K5 is selling the film.
Levinson, an Oscar-winner, is best known for Hollywood classics such as Rain Man, Avalon, Bugsy, and Good Morning, Vietnam. He debuted his latest project, Bucks County, USA, at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
