Harrison Ford, who donned a cowboy hat and loose-fitting chaps to play a wild west gunslinger in Jon Favreau’s sci-fi-western mashup isn’t ready to get out of the saddle just yet. THR is reporting that Ford is “attached” to star as iconic lawman Wyatt Earp in an adaptation of Max Allan Collins’ novel “Black Hats.” According to the trade, the story “blends fact with fiction in its telling of the story involving an older Earp, the one who spent his last years as a private detective and movie consultant in Los Angeles. The spin involves Earp learning that his friend and compatriot Doc Holliday had a son, now living in Prohibition-era New York City. While Holliday is long dead, the son has gotten himself in trouble with a rising mobster, Al Capone.
“[So] Earp teams up with Bat Masterson, one of his former deputies and now noted sportswriter for the New York Morning Telegraph, to take on the gang in what becomes a tale of six-shooters versus tommy guns,” the trade continues.
That story sounds pretty cool, a mix of a vintage Western with “The Untouchables.” Collins is familiar with the genre, having penned the graphic novel “Road to Perdition.”
The producers who brought the project to Ford’s doorstep said the actor was particularly keen to play an aging lawman carrying his six-shooter through the streets of New York City in the 1920s.