Clint Eastwood eyes J Edgar Hoover project

Los Angeles: Clint Eastwood is lining up his next directing project, a biopic of FBI director J Edgar Hoover, the nation`s No 1 crimefighter for almost 50 years.

Hoover was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, having headed its predecessor agency since 1924, and turned it into an efficient crimefighting organisation. He remained its director until his death in 1972, aged 77, but his sculpted persona was already coming apart at the seams; he employed the FBI to harass political activists and used illegal methods to make secret files on leaders. Many biographies also assert the man was a closeted homosexual and cross-dresser. Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar last year for writing the Harvey Milk biopic "Milk," penned the script. Eastwood is teaming with Brian Grazer and Ron Howard`s Imagine Entertainment on the picture, which was initially set up at Universal. It will most likely end up at Warner Bros., where Eastwood and his Malpaso shingle are based, as a Malpaso-Imagine production. There is a small connection between Hoover and the studio: Warners hired Hoover to act as a consultant on its 1959 movie "The FBI Story" and on the ABC spinoff series "The F.B.I." Eastwood, who is in post-production on his supernatural thriller "Hereafter," worked with Imagine in 2008 on the 1920s-set Angelina Jolie drama "The Changeling." Bureau Report