Michael Mann and Eric Roth wrote the screenplay for Comanche.
Looks like Comanche, a western project that has lingered too long in development hell, may finally be coming to the screen. But filmmaker Michael Mann (Heat, The Last of the Mohicans), who co-wrote the screenplay with Oscar-winning scriptwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) over 20 years ago, won’t be in the director’s chair.
Instead, Hostiles director Scott Cooper has been handed the reins to the film by Mann himself.
“I want to do a western,” Mann reportedly told a masterclass at the Lumière Festival in Lyon on Friday. “I have two screenplays, one of which I’m not going to do — I’m going to produce, and Scott Cooper is going to direct. It’s called Comanche.”
Based on the same true-life events that inspired John Ford’s classic 1956 western The Searchers (pictured above), which was in turn based on Frank Le May’s 1954 novel of the same title, Comanche offers a different take on the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, a white settler who was captured by Comanches at age nine in 1836 Texas, and subsequently spent the next 24 years with the Comanche Nation.
As the Humanities Texas website notes, Parker eventually married “the warrior Peta Nocona, with whom she had two sons and a daughter. White traders and soldiers spotted Parker several times during these years, but she refused to abandon her Comanche family. In 1860, however, Texas Rangers and federal soldiers abducted her, with her infant daughter, in an attack on a Comanche encampment in north Texas.
“Parker was reunited with the white family she no longer remembered. Sadly, she struggled to readjust. A number of times she tried to escape with her daughter and return to the Comanche and her two sons.
“Parker died in 1871 and was buried in Anderson County in East Texas. Her son Quanah —who became the most important Comanche leader of his day — later had her reinterred near his home in Oklahoma. In 1957, the federal government relocated her remains, along with those of Quanah and some seven hundred other Comanches, to the cemetery at Fort Sill.”
There has been no announcements made yet regarding cast members or the production start date for Comanche.
Scott Cooper’s other credits as a director include Crazy Heart (for which Jeff Bridges won an Oscar as Best Actor), Antlers, The Pale Blue Eye, and, most recently, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. Michael Mann, who also directed The Insider, Manhunter, Thief and Collateral, currently is in pre-production for Heat 2.
