A Total Mayor

Boundlessly talented filmmaker and, ahem, former Empire writer, Rod Lurie, will be returning to the political game he portrayed so well in The Contender with his next project. Abandoning the extortion and slander that peppered his previous effort, Lurie will take a lighter tone for politically-themed romantic comedy Beat The Eagle. Lurie will direct the film - written by Oscar-winning Dead Poets Society scribe, Tom Schulman - which tells the story of a former US president who retires to a small East Coast town to write his memoirs. Rather than quietly reclining on his sun-porch with a laptop and a jug of lemonade, the former political tiger is once more drawn into the thick of things when he is asked to run for mayor. What would initially seem a long way from the back-stabbing of Capitol Hill soon gets ugly when the owner of a local hardware store decides to run in competition.