Neil Burger Negotiating Gritty Bonnie & Clyde Biopic

The Limitless director is considering helming an adaption of Simon & Schuster's Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde by Jeff Guinn, which portrays the romantic gangsters with far more baggage than in previous incarnations.

Bestselling author Jeff Guinn combines exhaustive research with surprising, newly discovered material to tell the real tale of two kids from a filthy Dallas slum who fell in love and then willingly traded their lives for a brief interlude of excitement and, more important, fame. Go Down Together has it all—true romance, rebellion against authority, bullets flying, cars crashing, and, in the end, a dramatic death at the hands of a celebrity lawman.

This is the real story of Bonnie and Clyde and their troubled times, delivered with cinematic sweep by a masterful storyteller.

The book conveys the outlaw couple in a less romanticized, more gritty light. Before their spree of murder and thievery, there is the implication that Bonnie may have been a prostitute and Clyde being a victim a jailhouse sexual abuse (It was in retaliation that he committed his first murder.). A focus of the book is how very young the two were (just 22 years old) when they became part of Americana with a series of crimes that ended in a hail of bullets.

Burger's involvement is far from set in stone with his next project being the video game adaption Uncharted: Drake's Fortune.

Go Down Together will be adapted by Sheldon Turner (Up in the Air) with producers Bryan Furst and Marissa McMahon (daughter-in-law of WWE owner Vince McMahon), who is financing the project through her Kamala Films.