Craig Brewer to write and direct 'Gangster Princess'

Filmmaker Craig Brewer

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Apparently, this will be a busy year for Memphis-based filmmaker Craig Brewer.

In addition to directing “Boomerang,” the pilot for a proposed Fox network television drama with Felicity Huffman, Brewer will write and direct “Gangster Princess of Beverly Hills” for his longtime studio, Paramount Pictures.

Brewer’s fifth feature film will be his second shot outside the Mid-South and his first actually set outside his home region. (His “Footloose” remake was shot in Georgia, but set in small-town Tennessee.)

Inspired by an extraordinarily cinematic 2012 Rolling Stone article by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the film will tell the stranger-than-fiction true story of Lisette Lee, a glamorous socialite who called herself “the Korean Paris Hilton” and passed herself off as a Samsung heiress, model and singer before being exposed as a fraud and drug mule. As a Rolling Stone headline reported: “Lisette Lee wanted everyone to think she had it all, but beneath the bling were secrets, lies and private jets filled with weed.” In other words, Lisette Lee will be another of Brewer’s aspirational hustler heroes, like the pimp-turned-rapper Terrence Howard character in “Hustle & Flow” and the cello-appreciating car thief played by Eric Tate in “The Poor & Hungry.”

The movie is at the very earliest stages of development, Brewer said this week. He said what attracted him to the story was “the hustle itself, how vast it was, and how easy it was for people to be blinded by the wealth and the appearance of wealth.”

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