"Hollyfeld, here. Frank is a smart kid, who like many people comes from a dysfunctional home. Mom and Dad met in the war, and are too distracted by their upper middle-class lifestyles to fully acknowledge that their marriage isn't working. Mom is having an affair, Dad is perpetually trying to con his way out of potential bankruptcy. They're both too busy with their own lives to really care that young Frank has been impersonating a substitute French teacher at school, and has been holding Parent/Teacher conferences and planning a field trip to a bread factory. But Frank loves his folks, listening attentively to his Dad's lessons ('People only know what you tell them'), and trying hopelessly to get his Mom to quit smoking. He loves them so much, in fact, that when they divorce, he does what any normal kid would do: he runs away... and becomes one of the ten most wanted men in the country.

FRANK
My name is Frank Abagnale Jr, and some people consider me the world's greatest imposter. From 1964 to 1966 I successfully impersonated an airline pilot for Pan Am Airlines, and flew over two million miles for free. During that time I was also the Chief Resident Pediatrician at a Georgia hospital, the assistant Attorney General for the state of Louisiana, and a Professor of American History at a prestigious University in France. By the time I was caught and sentenced to prison, I had cashed over six million dollars in fraudulent checks in 26 foreign countries and all fifty states, and I did it all before my 18th birthday. To this day, I am the only teenager ever to have been placed on the FBI's ten most wanted list. My name is Frank Abagnale Jr.

Read that excerpt from the first scene in Steven Spielberg's next film, Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Christopher Walken and Tom Hanks, and tell me you don't want to see the movie. Still not interested? Let me tell you then that the story is true, and the script is grand.

Frank's (Leonardo DiCaprio) exploits, if you are unfamiliar with the real life events, are extraordinary, but perhaps what is most extraordinary about them is how ordinary they are. No grand schemes, no complex plans... Frank gets an idea, studies, buys some equipment, and then gets away with economic murder on almost every page of the script. It's his humanity as a con man that gets you. He isn't above us all, and everything he does seems like something we should have thought of ourselves. When he thinks he's caught with his pants down, he just recycles dialogue from TV shows, for God's sake. This is a con man we all can love.

If there is a flaw with the script, however, it's that there is so much of a focus on Frank's exploits that his character rarely shines through. We are given less an image of the man than a detailed pattern of his behaviour. This is a risky venture, since unless the actor portraying Frank is brilliant, which DiCaprio can be, we won't have much to identify with in Frank except his love for his family.

His family itself is an interesting unit, as somewhat described above. His father is a borderline radical, teaching his son often very questionable lessons about the importance of beating the system. His mother prefers just to throw money at her son, treating him almost as an unimportant equal, but her husband treats Frank like a son, trying to guide him through life as best he can. Ultimately, Frank's relationship with his father will make or break Catch Me If You Can - if the chemistry isn't right, if the performance isn't spot on, the audience won't be able to see why this antisocial bourgeois means so much to a man as smart as Frank, or why he even listens to his father in the first place. When reading the script, I kept thinking how great Tom Hanks could be in this role, his image as a role model being warped just enough to show off his underappreciated range (his role in Road to Perdition will have similar undertones). But then when I finished the script I checked online and discovered he was actually playing Joe Shaye, a far less well-developed character than Abagnale Sr, who is being played by Christopher Walken, an actor who probably would have been much better in Hanks' role.

Joe Shaye is the CIA official who finds himself in charge of what is at first a routine tracking of a con artist, and then a nation- (and soon world-) wide manhunt for the most successful con man in history. But his character doesn't have much to do other than that. The character can work, and work beautifully, but it will require a more carefully crafted performance than Hanks normally seems to do in his leading roles. Joe seems to connect with Frank, but for little reason other than he respects his skill. Perhaps they share a similar sense of loneliness, because for all of Frank's success, he rarely gets to connect with another human being. He falls in love, but lives in fear that his intricate web of lies will fall apart, leaving nothing except little Frank, still a teenager and nothing but a drifter.

Though an early draft, the script for Catch Me If You Can reviewed here is written by Jeff Nathanson, still the only screenwriter credited to the project, and therefore can be safely presumed to be a fairly accurate representation of the script being filmed now. In fact, nothing that has been released regarding this film in any way contradicts the screenplay resting before me. It's a smart piece of work, and the storyline is consistently intelligent and surprising (though it may seem like there were a lot of spoilers above, there really weren't - and besides, this is a true story anyway).

One walks away from Catch Me If You Can unable to dislike Frank Abagnale Jr, in spite of the fact that in the end he's just one slick son of a bitch. The same holds true for the script - smart, fast paced and entertaining, and you can easily overlook its potentially troublesome spots. If it's executed just right, Catch Me If You Can will be one likable, slick son of a bitch of a movie, too."

Part 1: Stranger Than Fiction

Until now, of course, it has landed in the lap of Steven Spielberg and actually looks like it will be his next project following Minority Report now that Lasse Hallstrom and Gore Verbinski are no longer on it. Leonardo DiCaprio is slated to star as Abagnale with Tom Hanks possibly playing the FBI guy who tracks him for years - Joe Shaye.

Did I mention that Abagnale was a teenager when he did all this?

Part 2: An Amazing Story

When he was a young man, Frank Abagnale had a fairly stable family (well, the script presents them that way), but things were just beginning to fray between his father - something of a low-rent con man himself as he tried to make his way through the world peddling stationary from his shop in New Jersey, but always wanting more - and his mother, a war bride from France. At a surprise custody hearing as the parentals get divorced, Frank Jr. makes up his mind to get out of there and go on the road.

Ever read Abbie Hoffman's rather cool tome, Steal This Book? In it, Hoffman went through a number of different ways to "make it through the world" for free. Abagnale took this thought further. He found unique and quite ingenious ways to get ahead, make millions, and live the life of a jet-setting playboy by learning all the pitfalls of "the system." He learned how to impersonate a pilot, a doctor, a lawyer, and many other people at the drop of a hat and with amazing dexterity. More importantly, he figured out how to forge checks in dozens of different ways so that he could get money out of banks, hotels, payrolls, and got better and better as the years went on - such that sometimes his forgeries went unnoticed as the company he was bilking (in this case Pan Am - see why they went under?) even cashed out the checks.

While doing this, the FBI was on his trail led by Joe Shaye, a man who got little respect at first for just busting "paper-hangers" as they're called. But that all changed when people began to realize what a genius they were dealing with.

Part 3: The Writing

Part 4: The Leo Factor

So what about Spielberg? He's the weird-factor, I'll say that. My reaction to that is something like when Michael Mann was announced for The Insider when I thought, "Huh?" Then it turned out to be one of the best movies of the decade. Spielberg is constantly doing the "troubled kid" movie, but this has more in common with pictures like The Sting and even maybe Charley Varrick than anything he's made. This is really a character piece and though Spielberg's done plenty of those, just imagine Spielberg directing Blow. Doesn't really fit, does it?

But maybe this will be a major return to form for him. Instead of trying to thrill us with visuals, maybe the director who knows almost better than anybody how to get to the emotional core of a script will come out with one of the best movies of his career as instead of having a paper thin script to work from, this time he's got a big, juicy one. Here's hoping Dreamworks really does roar ahead with this and Spielberg starts production immediately following Minority Report.

Could be one of the most thrilling pics of the year.

DiCaprio wouldn't be interested in playing Abagnale — and DreamWorks wouldn't be producing the film — if the character weren't both fascinating and sympathetic, despite his larkish criminal behavior. It'll be a great part for DiCaprio, who's known to be a gifted impersonator and put-on artist in his own right.

Nathanson wins you over by showing how the example set by Abagnale‘s con-artist father steers the impressionable youth toward a life of stealing and cheating. Nathanson also succeeds by making the reader feel the tension of staying only a nose hair or two ahead of the law, while at the same time sharing the thrill of getting away with crime after crime, which Abagnale does once he starts out on his own as a bad-check writer and impersonator at the tender age of 17.

In the script, Abagnale poses as an emergency-room doctor, a Pan-American Airlines co-pilot, and a lawyer. His bad-check writing scams are amazing in their resourcefulness. His ability to con almost anyone into believing anything he tells them is almost admirable. What comes through is a combination of humor and extreme tension, as the reader is constantly hoping that Abagnale will avoid capture while knowing it's bound to happen sooner or later.

The payoff comes from the cat-and-mouse relationship between Abagnale and his FBI pursuer, Joe Shaye, whom Abagnale dodges and fakes out at every turn until his third-act capture in Paris. There's a satisfying turn when Shaye and Abagnale become allies a year or so after Abagnale is tried and sentenced to prison. Satisying because you've been rooting all along for what seemed like a doomed criminal, and the FBI job at the finale makes the reader feel like he or she has been granted a reprieve.

FBI agent Shaye is a great part. So is Abagnale’s shyster father, and the role of Brenda, a candy-striper whom Abagnale meets and falls in love with while he’s impersonating a doctor.

Oscar Nominee Leonardo DiCaprio ("What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" and "Titanic") and two-time Academy Award winner Tom Hanks ("Philadelphia" and "Forrest Gump") engage in a game of cat and mouse in the real life drama, "Catch Me If You Can", under the direction of three-time Oscar winner Steven Spielberg ("Saving Private Ryan" and "Schindler's List").
Frank Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) worked as a doctor, a lawyer, and a co-pilot for a major airline all before his 18th birthday. A master of deception, he was also a brilliant forger, whose skill gave him his first claim to fame: at the age of 17, Frank Abagnale, Jr. became the most successful bank robber in the history of the United States. FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Hanks) had made it his prime mission to capture Frank and bring him to justice but Frank is always one step ahead of him, baiting him to continue the chase.
Steven Spielberg will direct "Catch Me If You Can" from a screenplay by Jeff Nathanson, based on the autobiographical book of the same name by Frank Abagnale, Jr. and Stan Redding. The film is being produced by Steven Spielberg, and Walter E Parkes, ("Gladiator"), with Barry Kemp, Laurie MacDonald, Michael Shane and Tony Romano executive producing.

DOMESTIC RELEASE: HOLIDAY 2002