The Monster of Florence

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George Clooney Says Script For ‘Monster Of Florence’ Being Tweaked Due To Amanda Knox Verdict
Says He Won’t Direct Remake Of ‘Our Brand Is Crisis’

George Clooney is awash in Oscar buzz right now, for both “The Ides of March” (which he directed and stars in) and “The Descendants” (in which he stars). So is he excited? Not really. “I’ve been in and out of buzz so many times,” he says, “I’ve learned not to pay attention.”

In fact, Clooney seems very much focused on the future. “I’m looking for projects!” he told the Playlist at the New York Film Festival premiere of “The Descendants” on Sunday night. “We’ve been trying to figure out what we’re doing next.”

Well, let’s see. He’s already completed work on Alfonso Cuarón‘s sci-fi film with Sandra Bullock, “Gravity.” So what he’s really scouting for now is another directing project to add to his slate which includes 2002’s “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” 2005’s “Good Night and Good Luck,” and 2008’s “Leatherheads.” He was attached to direct the heist film “Belmont Boys” a few years ago (with a script by Brian Koppelman and David Levien), but has since moved on. “I’m off that,” he told us. “I’m done.”

Then there was the CIA thriller “Argo,” which Clooney co-wrote and was also planning to direct – until it became clear that his work on ‘Ides’ would have prevented him from starting the new film until next year. Fortunately, another actor-turned-director – Ben Affleck – turned up to take over. “Ben called me up,” Clooney recalled, “and said ‘I’m interested in directing it.’ So I said, ‘Well, that’s great.’ Ben’s a really, really good director, so I thought that was a great thing.” “Argo,” which is set in 1979 (and is now shooting), concerns a team of agents who pretend to be filmmakers in order to rescue some U.S. hostages in Iran. (Sounds odd, but it’s based on a true story.) “I’d like to see Ben’s take on it,” Clooney said. “Because while it’s a thriller, it’s got comedy in it, too, which is going to be fun for him. He’s got a great sense of humor.”

Then there’s the developing movie version of the 2005 political-marketing documentary “Our Brand Is Crisis.” Clooney was toying with the idea of directing that, too. But although he still intends to produce and star in the film, he has decided not to helm it. “It’s not something I really understand [as a director],” he admitted. “It’s sort of out there. It’s not quite in my range. So there are better directors for that.”

Also on the docket is “The Monster of Florence,” based on Douglas Preston’s true-crime book about an Italian serial killer. The movie has no director yet, but Clooney – who has a home in Italy – will definitely be playing Preston. However, the book features (and paints a very unflattering portrait of) the prosecutor in the case – the same one who recently presided over the Amanda Knox trial. And since Knox’s guilty verdict was just reversed on appeal, the ‘Monster’ script is currently being adjusted.

“I was very happy for that verdict,” Clooney says. “Because I was one of those people who thought Amanda Knox was probably guilty, and then I ended up changing my mind. And it will affect our screenplay, that verdict—and that mentality: get a conviction at all costs—because it’s the theme of the book and the screenplay.”

And Clooney definitely won’t be directing the picture, he said, because he only takes supporting roles in films he directs saying, “When you’re directing, you’re really doing everything—you’re really busy!” Which sounds like he might be up for a little real-life downtime. If there are no acting or directing projects for a while, he said, no problem. “I’m fine. I’ve got stuff to do.”

“The Descendants” hits theaters on November 18th.
[Photo via CelebBuzz]

Jen Vineyard posted to Actors, George Clooney, Films, The Monster Of Florence at 10:05 am on October 18, 2011 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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By Douglas Preston

My wife and I had always dreamed of living in Italy. Six years ago we finally made the move with our two young children. We rented a fourteenth-century farmhouse surrounded by olive groves and vineyards in the enchanting hills south of Florence. There were two famous landmarks near us: the villa La Sfacciata, once the home of Amerigo Vespucci, the Florentine explorer who gave America its name; and the villa I Collazzi, said to have been designed by Michelangelo, where Prince Charles painted many of his watercolors of the Tuscan landscape.

The olive grove beyond our front door boasted a third landmark, of sorts. It had been the site of one of the most horrific murders in Italian history, one of a string of double homicides committed by a serial killer known as “the Monster of Florence.” As an author of murder mysteries, I was more curious than dismayed. I began researching the case. It didn’t take me long to realize I’d stumbled across one of the most harrowing and remarkable stories in the annals of crime.

I contrived to introduce myself to the journalist who was the acknowledged expert on the case, a former crime correspondent for La Nazione named Mario Spezi. We met in Caffè Ricchi, in Piazza Santo Spirito, overlooking Brunelleschi’s last and greatest church. Spezi was a journalist of the old school, with a handsome if cadaverous face, salt-and-pepper hair, and a Gauloise hanging from his lip. He wore a Bogart fedora and trench coat, and, knocking back one espresso after another, he told me the full story. As he spoke, he had his pocket notebook open on the table and he sketched his thoughts—I later learned it was a habit of his—the pencil cutting and darting across the paper, making arrows and circles and boxes and dotted lines, illustrating the intricate connections among the killings, the arrests, the suspects, the trials, and the many failed lines of investigation.

Between 1974 and 1985, seven couples—fourteen people in all—were murdered while making love in parked cars in the hills of Florence. The case was never solved, and it has become one of the longest and most expensive criminal investigations in Italian history. More than 100,000 men have been investigated and more than a dozen arrested, and scores of lives have been ruined by rumor and false accusations. There have been suicides, exhumations, poisonings, body parts sent by post, séances in graveyards, lawsuits, and prosecutorial vendettas. The investigation has been like a malignancy, spreading backward in time and outward in space, metastasizing to different cities and swelling into new investigations, with new judges, police, and prosecutors, more suspects, more arrests, and many more lives ruined.

It was an extraordinary story, and I would—to my sorrow—come to share Spezi’s obsession with it. We became friends after that first meeting, and in the fall of 2000 we set off to find the truth. We believed we had identified the real killer. We interviewed him. But along the way we offended the wrong people, and our investigation took an unexpected turn. Spezi has just emerged from three weeks in prison, accused of complicity in the Monster of Florence killings. I have been accused of obstruction of justice, planting evidence, and being an accessory to murder. I can never return to Italy.

It all began one summer morning many years ago in the Florentine hills. The date was June 7, 1981, a Sunday. Mario Spezi, then thirty-five, was covering the crime desk at La Nazione, Florence’s leading paper, when a call came in: a young couple had been found dead in a quiet lane in the hills south of town. Spezi, who lived in those same hills, hopped into his Citroën and drove like hell along back roads, arriving before the police.

He will never forget what he saw. The Tuscan countryside, dotted with olive groves and vineyards, lay under a sky of cobalt blue. A medieval castle, framed by cypress trees, crowned a nearby rise. The boy seemed to be sleeping in the driver’s seat, his head leaning on the window. Only a little black mark on his temple, and the car window shattered by a bullet, indicated that it was a crime scene. The girl’s body lay some feet behind the car, at the foot of a little embankment, amid scattered wildflowers. She had also been shot and was on her back, naked except for a gold chain, which had fallen between her lips. Her vagina had been removed with a knife.

“What shook me most of all,” Spezi told me, “was the coldness of the scene. I’d seen many murder scenes before, and this wasn’t like any of them.” Everything was unnaturally composed, immobile, with no signs of struggle or confusion. It looked, he said, like a museum diorama.

Due to the sexual nature of the crime, it was assumed that the killer was a man. And yet the medical examiner’s report noted that the killer had not sexually assaulted the woman. On the contrary, he had assiduously avoided touching her body, except to perform a mutilation so expert that the medical examiner speculated he might be a surgeon—or a butcher. The report also noted that the killer had used a peculiar knife with a special notch in it, probably a scuba knife.

Spezi’s article caused a sensation: it revealed that a serial killer was stalking the countryside of Florence. In a sidebar, next to the article, La Nazione pointed to something the police had overlooked: this killing was similar to a double homicide that had taken place in the hills north of Florence in 1974. The article prompted the police to compare the shells recovered from both crimes. They discovered that the bullets had been fired by the same gun, a .22-caliber Beretta “long barrel” firing Winchester series “H” copper-jacketed rounds, which, according to ballistics experts, probably came from the same box of fifty. The gun had a defective firing pin that left an unmistakable mark on the rim of each shell.

The investigation that followed lifted the lid off a bizarre underworld, which few Florentines realized existed in the beautiful hills surrounding their city. Because most Italians live with their parents until they marry, sex in cars is a national pastime. At night, dozens of voyeurs prowled the hills spying on people making love in parked cars. Locally, these voyeurs were called “Indiani,” or Indians, because they crept around in the dark, some loaded down with sophisticated electronic equipment like suction-cup microphones and night-vision cameras. Following a quick investigation, the police arrested and jailed one of these Indiani.

A few months later the killer struck again, on a Saturday night with no moon, this time north of Florence, using the same Beretta and performing the same mutilation. This third double homicide panicked Florence and garnered front-page headlines across Italy.

Spezi worked nonstop for a month, filing fifty-seven articles. The excellent contacts he had developed among the police and the Carabinieri ensured he had the breaking news first. The circulation of La Nazione skyrocketed to the highest point in its history. Spezi wrote about one suspect, a priest, who frequented prostitutes for the thrill of shaving their pubic hair. He wrote about a psychic who spent a night in the cemetery where a victim was buried, sending and receiving messages from the dead. Spezi’s articles became famous for their dry turns of phrase and that one wicked little detail that remained with readers long after their morning espresso. Florentines have a flair for conspiracy thinking, and the citizenry indulged in wild speculation. Spezi’s articles were a counterpoint to the hysteria: understated and ironic in tone, they crushed one rumor after another and gently pointed the reader back to the actual evidence.

Late that November, Spezi received a journalistic prize for work he had done unrelated to the case. He was invited to Urbino to accept the prize, a kilo of the finest white Umbrian truffles. His editor allowed him to go only after he promised to file a story from Urbino. Not having anything new to write about, Spezi recounted the histories of some of the famous serial killers of the past, from Jack the Ripper to the Monster of Düsseldorf. He concluded by saying that Florence now had its very own serial killer—and there, amid the perfume of truffles, he gave the killer a name: “il Mostro di Firenze,” the Monster of Florence.

The austere savagery of the crimes preyed heavily on Spezi’s mind. He began to have nightmares and was fearful for his young and beautiful Flemish wife, Myriam, and for their baby daughter, Eleonora. The Spezis lived in a converted monastery on a hill high above the city, in the very heart of the Monster’s territory. What frightened Mario most of all, I think, was that coming in contact with such barbarity had forced him to confront the existence of a kernel of absolute evil within us all. The Monster, he once told me, was more like us than we might care to admit—it was a matter of degree, not kind.

Myriam urged her husband to seek help, and finally he agreed. Instead of going to a psychiatrist, Spezi, a devout Catholic, turned to a monk who ran a small mental-health practice out of his cell in a crumbling eleventh-century Franciscan monastery. Brother Galileo Babbini was short, with Coke-bottle glasses that magnified his piercing black eyes. He was always cold, even in summer, and wore a shabby down coat beneath his brown monk’s habit. He seemed to have stepped out of the Middle Ages, and yet he was a highly trained psychoanalyst with a doctorate from the University of Rome.

Brother Galileo combined psychoanalysis with mystical Christianity to counsel people recovering from devastating trauma. His methods were not gentle, and he was unyielding in his pursuit of truth. He had, Spezi told me, an almost supernatural insight into the dark side of the human soul. Spezi would see him throughout the case; he would confide to me that Brother Galileo had preserved not only his sanity, but also his life.

[continued on six more pages of this at the link]

Douglas Preston: "The Monster of Florence movie with George Clooney is on track and proceeding well. I will post... [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

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Dark side of Florence: George Clooney and the 'crucified' girl

Prosecutor who led Monster of Florence case – soon to be a Clooney film - has a new killer on his hands

COLUMN LAST UPDATED AT 08:23 ON WED 7 MAY 2014

FLORENCE – Does the Tuscan capital have a new 'monster' on its hands? A serial killer to rival the so-called Monster of Florence who struck 16 times between 1968 and 1985 and has never been caught? It looks like it - and the new killer's timing could hardly be more Hollywood-friendly.

Last week, the American screenwriter Chris McQuarrie was in town to scout locations for the shooting of The Monster of Florence, which George Clooney will produce and star in as the American writer Douglas Preston, on whose book the film is based.

Preston came to live in Tuscany in 2000 and discovered that a garden near his new home was the scene of one of the murders perpetrated by the 'monster', who always targeted couples making out in public places, shooting them with a Beretta pistol at close range, and invariably mutilating the genitals of the female victim.

Preston then took it upon himself to look into the killings but got caught up in what authorities say was a botched attempt to derail the investigation.

Back to the present – and according to Italian media, screenwriter McQuarrie was spotted carrying The Dark and Bloody Guide to Florence (with an introduction by Douglas Preston) under his arm. For authenticity, he should have come a week later.

This Monday, the body of a Romanian prostitute was discovered, naked but for her socks and tennis shoes, her arms duct-taped to a metal bar as if she had been crucified.

A man passing by on his bicycle found the dead girl on her knees, in woods close to a cemetery on Florence's northern periphery. "She was tied with her arms outstretched; her head was rolled over," he told the Corriere della Sera. "It looked like she was crucified."

First reports say Andrea Cristina Zamfir, 26, from Romania, was raped and killed after having performed sexual acts and after a long, desperate struggle to get loose that left her elbows bruised. Coroners estimate she died around midnight

The case is eerily similar to one a year ago when a 46-year-old Italian prostitute was attacked in a similar way in nearly the same location. She escaped, however, and is now working with investigators looking into the two killings and the disappearance of other working girls.

“Once again we are seeing the dark side of this city,” said Michele Giuttari, the bestselling Sicilian crimewriter and ex-cop who headed the homicide team that investigated the Monster of Florence murders.

Partly because of the killer's mutilation of sexual organs, Giuttari believed the 'monster' had links to freemasons and/or satanic sects – and he believes the new killer could be in the same mold.

"The whole world wants to visit enchanting Florence," Giuttari told me. “But the city has a dark soul, with secret sects, freemasonry and esoteric dark arts. And when that side occasionally reveals itself, we see crimes like this one – a woman killed and left hanging like a crucifix on a road called Cemetery Way.”

And here come the twists…

The investigation of a possible new serial killer is being coordinated by Paolo Canessa, the same prosecutor who worked on the Monster of Florence cases – still unsolved and still making legal reverberations today.

The Monster of Florence was co-written by Preston with an Italian journalist called Mario Spezi. The book took as its central premise a private theory of Spezi's that a Sardinian man, Antonio Vinci, was the monster and that Giuttari was wrong to be pursuing the "dark arts" line of inquiry.

Today, however, long after the book became a bestseller, inquiries have proved Vinci to have been innocent while Spezi stands accused of attempting to plant evidence to prove his baseless theory. The preliminary hearing is set for 25 June.

If followers of the Amanda Knox murder trials are thinking this is ringing bells, they are not mistaken: Preston and Spezi inserted themselves into that case too, going on television in the United States and Italy to push another baseless theory of a deranged prosecutor going after the wrong person.

But there’s a saying in Italy: Il tempo è galantuomo - time is a gentleman. Years later, the prosecutor’s charge of murder against Amanda Knox has held up on appeal and it is Spezi who is on trial for allegedly mucking up a murder investigation. ·

Katiedot wrote:I'm not sure.  My impression is that location scouting normally happens a few months before filming starts, so that could put George at a summer/autumn film shoot in Italy.  Sounds like a perfect honeymoon!

That's assuming George is still starring in this.