Warren Beatty, Hollywood veteran and all-round screen legend, has been quietly plotting his comeback since 2011, when Paramount announced Beatty would write, direct and headline an untitled period flick in what would go on to become his first directorial effort since the turn of the millennium.
That film, one that quickly developed into a passion project for Warren Beatty, is known as Rules Don’t Apply, a star-studded romantic comedy headlined by Lily Collins and Alden Ehrenreich, your new Han Solo. They’re on board to play Marla Mabrey and dashing driver Frank Forbes, respectively, two young adults in 1950s Hollywood who want nothing more than to make ends meet while working under the seemingly all-consuming shadow of billionaire filmmaker, famed aviator, and notorious womanizer, Howard Hughes.
As today’s latest snippet reveals, the pair “have an instant attraction, but this is hindered by the strict rules laid down by Hughes that prohibit any romantic or sexual interaction between his employees.” Warren Beatty, meanwhile, is the one attached to that meaty, complex role of Hughes, famed entrepreneur and, at the time in which Rules Don’t Apply is set, one of the most powerful businessmen on the planet. That makes for quite a boss, as Collins and Ehrenreich realize before long.
Rule Don’t Apply opens on November 23, but can it woo the Academy? Alec Baldwin, Annette Bening, Haley Bennett, Candice Bergen, Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, Steve Coogan, Taissa Farmiga, Ed Harris, Megan Hilty, Oliver Platt and Martin Sheen round out that enviable casting docket.
