John Carpenter’s Gangster Project: The Prince

There’s a new John Carpenter movie being shopped around, that should it ever get made might be pretty damn awesome. It’s called “The Prince”, and will be a major departure for John Carpenter, the master of horror movies. According to one of “The Prince’s” screenwriters, the movie is a modern version of Clint Eastwood’s Western “Unforgiven”, with an ex-mob guy who has since retired from the life who has to come back when his daughter goes missing, and the ex-mob guy has to bust some heads and bury some people in the desert. Or something to that effect.

CHUD got in touch with one of the writers of “The Prince” and got this about the movie:

“We [Passmore and co-writer Andre Fabrizio] were trying to do Unforgiven as a gangster movie, because we’re both just huge fans of that,” he told me.

When I said that it sounded like a departure from Carpenter’s other work, Passmore agreed, and spilled more beans: “It’s a bit of a departure. It’s definitley more of a very character based crime movie. I don’t know what’s going on with it right now, but the premise is that this guy was the most [badass] gangster of all time in Las Vegas, and he’s left the life and created this whole new world. His wife died but he’s raising his kid. He’s living in the middle of nowhere and he’s this very religious, trying to live a straight life guy. His daughter is now going to school at UCLA and she disappears, and he goes looking for her. The trail leads to Vegas and he has to go get her, and the entire city kind of comes down on top of him.”

He said that the version that he, Fabrizio and Carpenter were happiest with was “brutal and violent and dark at the end,” but that he doesn’t know when – or even if – this project will start moving forward.

“Brutal and violent and dark at the end”. Ah, sounds like my kind of movie. I think people forget that “Unforgiven”, for all its bleakness, actually had a very happy ending. No one seems to know when, or if “The Prince” will ever get made. It would be a shame if it never got made, especially with all the crap and ’80s “re-imaginings” and reboots we have to sift through nowadays.

Below: “See there? That’s a raccoon. Bet you haven’t killed one of them before.”