Ben Stiller is eyeing a role in writer/director/producer Alan Ball’s I Am Chippendales, Variety reports. Based on a manuscript by Rodney Sheldon, the film serves as a biopic of sorts for Paul Snider and Somen “Steve” Banerjee, the men who went through unlikely steps to form the popular nightclub franchise.
Planned some years back for the late Tony Scott to direct, the project was then likened to Scott’s True Romance and was said to chart the improbable rise and fall of Banerjee, who went from pumping gas in Culver City to running a high-end night club that evolved into Chippendales. After hiring a New York choreographer to polish the all-male dance troupe, Banerjee became wildly rich, as well as unreasonably competitive and paranoid.
Stiller, who recently directed and starred in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, would play the part of Banerjee’s partner and choreorapher Nick DeNoia. Stiller can next be seen on the big screen in Night at the Museum 3, hitting theaters December 19.
I Am Chippendales is being produced by Permut Presentations and Sentinel Pictures.
(Photo Credit: Joerg Schulz-Dolgner / WENN.com)
