Jon Turteltaub Will Direct A 'Crazy Eddie' Movie, Instead Of Giving Us The Third 'National Treasure' Movie We All Crave
Jon Turteltaub could give us all what we really want: a third National Treasure movie. Instead, he's going to direct Insane, a movie about Crazy Eddie Antar, the owner of an electronics chain who ended up in jail after committing one of the greatest securities frauds in history. It will no doubt make for a crazy true story – but will it be as exciting as watching Nicolas Cage running around finding clues hidden by the Founding Fathers? I doubt it.
Crazy Eddie
If you lived in New York during the '70s and '80s, there's a very good chance you were inundated with commercials for Crazy Eddie, an electronics chain that had advertising featuring radio DJ Jerry Carroll yelling like a madman about the crazy deals you could get on camcorders and TVs. The chain was owned by Eddie Antar, and the reason people remember him to this day isn't because of his stores. It's because he ended up going to jail for fraud. And now, his story will become a movie.
Deadline reports that Jon Turteltaub, director of the National Treasure films and The Meg, will helm Insane, which will track the real Crazy Eddie's rise and fall. Per their story:
Antar opened his first store in Brooklyn, grew quickly to 43 stores, and then briefly became a Wall Street sensation when he took the company public. Those were fueled by groundbreaking ads delivered with used car salesman subtlety, and frenzied enough to obscure trouble in the back room. The trouble was, Antar had been skimming money and falsifying inventory to inflate stock value. United States Attorney Michael Chertoff, who prosecuted the case, would call Eddie Antar the "Darth Vader of capitalism."
Antar went on the run after his crimes were uncovered, eventually fleeing to Israel. However, Israel later extradited him, and Antar eventually ended up in prison. All of this will no doubt make for a wild movie. The film will be told from the point-of-view of Crazy Eddie's cousin Sam E. Antar, who was the CFO of Crazy Eddie, and helped with the fraud – "a young cousin with an accounting degree brought into a family business and who cooked the books to hide the skimming that was going on."
This sounds like an overall cool idea, and I look forward to seeing it. But you know what I look forward to seeing more? National Treasure 3. Make it happen, Turteltaub!