Strong Studios Sets Salad Oil Swindle Pic ‘The Tank Job’ As First Original Feature; Oscar Nominee Alec Sokolow To Direct From His Script
deadline.comThe recently-launched Strong Studios has acquired rights to Alec Sokolow’s script The Tank Job, setting the Oscar nominee as the film’s director.The Ballantyne Strong, Inc.
subsidiary’s first original feature film adapts Norman Miller’s book, The Great Salad Oil Swindle. It’s a true-life crime drama that watches as ex-butcher turned salad oil exporter Anthony “Tino” DeAngelis and his Bayonne, New Jersey blue collar crew nearly destroy American Express and eventually crash Wall Street in their bid to corner the market on salad oil futures in the early 1960s.Award-winning business journalist, CNBC contributor, author and former hedge fund manager Ron Insana, who heads up Insana Entertainment Group as CEO, brought the idea for The Tank Job to Ballantyne Chairman Kyle Cerminara in January of last year, and they have been collaborating on it ever since.
Cerminara and Insana are former colleagues, having worked together in the hedge fund industry under Steve Cohen of Point72. Both had aspirations of building feature films and documentaries that tell the stories of many of the recent great financial dramas that have occurred in the capital markets industry.
This, then, was the impetus for Ballantyne to create Strong Studios, and hire David Ozer to lead the business unit as President.Sam Sokolow (National Geographic’s Genius) and Nicholas Levis (Darkon) will produce The Tank Job alongside Insana, with Cerminara, Ozer and Ballantyne CEO Mark Roberson serving as exec producers.
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