Warren Beatty May Finally Finish and Release a Film He's Been Working On For 40 Years

Warren Beatty, a very deliberate filmmaker who has not released a movie in 14 years, may soon finally unveil a project that he has been working on for nearly four decades. If he feels like it, of course.

The Oscar-winning screen legend, now 77-years-old, began working on a biopic of Howard Hughes shortly after the mogul/filmmaker/aviator/recluse died in 1976. The script for the project went through countless iterations over the next 39 years, and as the New York Times reports, a version of the story that now focuses on a young actress who worked for Hughes in the 1950s and ’60s was finally shot last spring. The young actress, who is played by Lily Collins, “experiences the collapse of an old moral order and the rise of a new one.”

Beatty himself is playing Hughes, and is joined in the film by Matthew Broderick, Martin Sheen, Annette Bening, and Alec Baldwin.

Though 2001’s Town & Country, Beatty’s last film, was a massive flop, his name still carries a lot of weight around Hollywood. His reputation and connections helped him secure a stable of backers that include several hedge fund titans, director Brett Ratner, and Sarah E. Johnson, who was one of the producers on Birdman.

The passion project had gone into hibernation at various points over the last 40 years, while Beatty wrote, directed and starred in a huge range other movies. (He won an Oscar for Reds and played iconic noir characters both real and fictional in Bugsy and Dick Tracy, respectively; he also bombed hard with Ishtar.) A few years after Beatty’s disappearance from the limelight, Martin Scorsese came out with his own Howard Hughes biopic, 2004’s The Aviator. It starred Leonardo DiCaprio at about the same age as Beatty would have been had he made his own Hughes movie back in the 1970s.

Photo: Associated Press