George Clooney to direct new film: Yankee Commandante

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George Clooney is attached to direct The Yankee Comandante, a Focus Features drama based on a New Yorker article about an American who assisted Fidel Castro and other Cuban rebels overthrow the reigning Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. Clooney and partner Grant Heslov will produce via their Smokehouse production company, a rep for Focus confirms.

The lengthy article, written by David Grann and published in the May 28 issue of The New Yorker, details the saga of William Alexander Morgan, who became the only foreigner other than Che Guevara to reach the title of Comandante in Cuba. His actions caught the eye of U.S. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

The project likely will not be Clooney's next movie as a director. The Oscar-nominated filmmaker (The Ides of March, Good Night, and Good Luck) is working on an adaptation of the WWII Nazi art heist book The Monuments Men. And he's busy as an actor, next appearing opposite Sandra Bullock in Alfonso Cuaron's 3D space drama Gravity.

Clooney is repped by CAA.

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I hope Hollywood gets it right — but I doubt it

By George Moneo, on July 25, 2012,

Here's an article that was sent to us by Toledo Blade staff writer Jessica Shor about the wife of the now infamous "yanqui comandante," William Morgan, who is trying to repatriate his remains in Ohio. It's of some interest in that George Clooney is considering optioning the story. God help us.

In many ways, South Toledo resident Olga Goodwin is a typical Midwestern grandmother.

The 76-year-old volunteers at her church, makes dinner for her husband each evening at 5 o'clock, and spends her free time learning the art of Google searches.

But the energetic Cuban native has been fighting a fierce battle for more than a decade: to bring home to Toledo the remains of her late husband, William Morgan, a celebrated rebel soldier who left Toledo in 1957 to fight for her country during the Cuban revolution and died at the hands of Fidel Castro's army.

"William did his best for my country. He said when he found me, he found everything," Mrs. Goodwin said of their meeting in the midst of the fighting in her native land.

It's a story that she has carried with her since leaving Cuba in 1980, and one that has attracted the attention of Hollywood actor and director George Clooney.

William Morgan is buried in Havana. His widow seeks to bring his body back to Toledo. William Morgan is buried in Havana. His widow seeks to bring his body back to Toledo. Enlarge

Clooney is in the process of optioning the dramatic rights to Mrs. Goodwin's life story for a Hollywood production, according to her attorney, Jon Richardson.

In her first interview since the deal, Mrs. Goodwin expressed hope that big-screen publicity will bring an end to a saga that began in Cuba 54 years ago and will conclude, she prays, here in Toledo.

In 1958, Cuba was under the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and Olga had taken up arms in the resistance. While in Castro's army, she met Mr. Morgan, whose story seems made for Hollywood.