Ben Affleck to Star in George Clooney's THE TENDER BAR for Amazon

It looks like Ben Affleck is jumping on board the next film that George Clooney is set to direct. The film is titled The Tender Bar, and it’s being produced by Amazon Studios. Affleck is currently in negotiations to star in the film.

Apparently, Affleck and Clooney have been trying to work together for years, and this is the project that they finally both were able to land on. There’s no word on if Clooney will have a role in the film, but the option is open.

The coming of age film is based on the J.R. Moehringer memoir about “growing up in Long Island seeking out father figures among the patrons at his uncle’s bar.

Clooney is producing the film with his producing partner Grant Heslov and will produce through their Smokehouse Pictures banner. William Monahan wrote the script, and this is the full description from the book that the film is based on:

J.R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It was the voice of his father, a New York City disc jockey who vanished before J.R. spoke his first word. Sitting on the stoop, pressing an ear to the radio, J.R. would strain to hear in that plummy baritone the secrets of masculinity and identity. Though J.R.'s mother was his world, his rock, he craved something more, something faintly and hauntingly audible only in The Voice.

At eight years old, suddenly unable to find The Voice on the radio, J.R. turned in desperation to the bar on the corner, where he found a rousing chorus of new voices. The alphas along the bar--including J.R.'s Uncle Charlie, a Humphrey Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; and Joey D, a softhearted brawler--took J.R. to the beach, to ballgames, and ultimately into their circle. They taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fathering-by-committee. Torn between the stirring example of his mother and the lurid romance of the bar, J.R. tried to forge a self somewhere in the center. But when it was time for J.R. to leave home, the bar became an increasingly seductive sanctuary, a place to return and regroup during his picaresque journeys. Time and again the bar offered shelter from failure, rejection, heartbreak--and eventually from reality.

In the grand tradition of landmark memoirs, The Tender Bar is suspenseful, wrenching, and achingly funny. A classic American story of self-invention and escape, of the fierce love between a single mother and an only son, it's also a moving portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, and an unforgettable depiction of how men remain, at heart, lost boys.

This sounds like it’ll be a great project for Affleck and Clooney to be a part of.

Source: Deadline