Brody's Notes... Dustin Lance Black & Clint Eastwood Team With Imagine Entertainment-Produce Biopic On FBI 's Hoover

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover    

Official Photo By The U. S. Department Of Justice- FBI

By Brody Levesque (Bethesda, Maryland) Mar 27 | From his appointment on May 10th, 1924 by President Calvin Coolidge as Director of the Bureau of Investigation-predecessor to the modern day FBI- and credited with being instrumental in restructuring the scope and nature of the Bureau's work and purpose as its powers were broadened and it was re-named the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI as an increasingly controversial figure until his death on the morning of May 2nd, 1972.
Often referred to as a petty tyrant behind his back but never to his face out of fear of retribution owing to his considerable power and influence as FBI Director, Hoover's reach extended past the confines of the Bureau and the Department of Justice, touching into the lives of political leaders, celebrities, and ordinary Americans in  a remarkable career that spanned forty-eight years as Director.

Hoover was noted as sometimes being capricious in his leadership; he frequently fired FBI agents, singling out those whom he thought "looked stupid like truck drivers" or he considered to be "pinheads." He also relocated agents who had displeased him to career-ending assignments and locations.

Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency, and with instituting a number of modern innovations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. It is because of Hoover's long and controversial reign that FBI directors are now limited to 10-year terms by law. 

Earlier this month it was announced that Imagine Entertainment's Brian Grazer had signed Academy Award winning Director & Actor Clint Eastwood to direct a film based on a screenplay that was written by Oscar award winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black tentatively entitled 'Hoover,' covering the period of the FBI Director's life from 1935 to his death in 1972.

Entertainment sources are quoted as saying that Eastwood's Production company, Malpaso Productions, will co-produce the film with Imagine Entertainment, although it’s still unclear what studio will land the project, which was originally set up at Universal. It will likely move to Warner Bros., which has produced and financed the majority of Eastwood’s work.

Clint Eastwood Photo By Malpaso Productions

In a bit of historical irony, during the later part of his career, Hoover was a consultant to Warner Brothers for a 1959 theatrical film about the Bureau entitled; The FBI Story, and in 1965 on Warner Brothers' long-running spin-off television series, The F.B.I. Hoover personally made sure that Warner Brothers would portray the FBI more favorably than other crime dramas of the times. 

In an interview with screenwriter Dustin Lance Black on March 25th, New York Post's entertainment reporter Jarett Wieselman, writes in the intro: 

"One of my favorite movies as a child was "Clue," and throughout the 1954-set film countless references are made to J. Edgar Hoover. I had no idea who that was until one character said he was "the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation." But even with that minor description in place, it wasn't until a high school American History class that I fully grasped the power of his life story. I mean, this man created the F.B.I and instituted the fingerprint database that is still used today.
So I'm surprised it's taken this long (he died in 1972) for the man, the myth, the legend to earn a big screen biopic. But perhaps Hollywood was just waiting for the right duo to delve into his life."

Dustin Lance Black  Photo By Focus Features

Black tells Wieselman in the interview:

"It's weird that it's just gotten out in the press because it's been going on for a long time," "It's a really important project to me and I'm super excited that Clint has signed on. He's the perfect director for the project."

There has been speculation as to the question whether the film will delve into the FBI Director's long rumoured closeted homosexuality and cross-dressing. When Wieselman asked, Black replied:

"Well, look who you're talking to. I wrote the script ... what do you think?"

Since the middle of the 1940s, unsubstantiated rumours have circulated that Hoover was Gay.  It has been suggested that Clyde Tolson, Associate Director of the FBI, who was Hoover's  number two man at the Bureau and his heir, may also have been Hoover's lover. Hoover described Tolson as his alter ego: the men not only worked closely together during the workday, but also ate meals, went to night clubs, and vacationed together.This closeness between the two is often cited as evidence that they were lovers, although former FBI employees who knew them, said that the relationship was merely "brotherly."

Tolson inherited Hoover's estate and moved into his home, having accepted the American flag that draped Hoover's casket. Tolson is buried a few yards away from Hoover in the Congressional Cemetery. Attorney Roy Cohn, an associate of Hoover during the 1950s investigations of Communists and himself a closeted homosexual, opined that Hoover was too frightened of his own sexuality to have anything approaching a normal sexual or romantic relationship.

In his 1993 biography, 'Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover,' journalist Anthony Summers quoted a witness, "society divorcee" Susan Rosenstiel, (who later served time at New York City's Riker's Island prison for perjuring herself in a 1971 case) who claimed to have seen Hoover engaging in cross-dressing in the 1950s; she claimed that on two occasions she witnessed Hoover wearing a fluffy black dress with flounces and lace, stockings, high heels and a black curly wig, at homosexual orgies.

During his lifetime Hoover hunted down and threatened anyone who made insinuations about his sexuality. He also spread destructive, unsubstantiated rumours, and his notorious extensive secret files contained surveillance material on American political figures and others, speculated to be acquired for the purpose of blackmail. 

Nearly twenty years after the Director's death, the opening of Soviet KGB archives revealed evidence that there was a Soviet campaign which used allegations of homosexuality to discredit Hoover during the Cold War.

Since the Hoover film project currently isn't set up with a studio, there's been no tentative production schedule released.