Don Winslow’s The Winter of Frankie Machine is headed to the big screen, with The Bear creator Christopher Storer at the helm, Deadline reports.
Winslow’s novel, published in 2006 by Knopf, follows Frankie Machianno, a retired hitman who finds himself the target of a murder plot. A critic for Kirkus called the book “a sprawling, anecdotal saga in which the whole…is less than the sum of its parts.”
Storer began his career as the director of comedy specials including Bo Burnham: what. and Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King. He worked as an executive producer on the series Ramy and, in 2022, created The Bear, the hit Hulu show about a chef who takes over his family’s sandwich shop in Chicago.
A film adaptation of Frankie Machine was previously in the works shortly after the novel’s publication, with Martin Scorsese interested in directing Robert De Niro in the title role. Scorsese chose instead to adapt Charles Brandt’s nonfiction book I Heard You Paint Houses; the resulting film, The Irishman, was released in 2019.
Storer’s Frankie Machine adaptation will be written by Brian Koppelman and David Levien, the team behind Rounders and Ocean’s Thirteen. Shane Salerno is producing; he previously co-wrote the 2012 film based on Winslow’s Savages and is behind two other Winslow adaptations: a film based on City of Fireand a television series based on the author’s Border trilogy of novels.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
