There is going to be another attempt to make a film about the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. According to multiple published sources, Rob Weiss will adapt Sonny Barger’s memoir Hell’s Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club for the screen.
Weiss has an extensive filmography and he has worked as a writer on the HBO series Entourage, was the Executive Producer for the HBO series How to Make It in America, and he was a producer on the television series Punk’d and the feature film American Psycho.
Tony Scott
The film rights to Barger’s memoir had belonged to director Tony Scott. Scott also owned the film rights to Hunter Thompson’s Hells’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs and Jay Dobyns’ No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey To The Inner Circle Of The Hells Angels. According to Dobyns, “In 2005, after becoming acquainted with Fox entertainment through ATF’s introduction of Agent Dobyns with the America’s Most Wanted feature, a film researcher for Fox and film director Tony Scott contacted Agent Dobyns. Fox and Scott were developing a film about the Hells Angels. A relationship was struck, based on the researcher’s stated admiration for Agent Dobyns’ work, dedication and honesty.” The deal was that Scott would direct the film for a division of 20th Century Fox called Fox 2000 using a script by Academy Award winning writer Stephen Gaghan.
According to informed sources, Scott never made a film about the Hells Angels because there was a consensus among members of the club that non-members should never be allowed to wear the Hells Angels patch. The last time a non-Angel wore the club’s insignia with the club’s permission was in the 1967 movie Hells Angels on Wheels starring Jack Nicholson.
There remains sentiment in the club that it would be disrespectful to club brothers who died for that patch to allow non-members to wear the death head .
After Scott
After Scott committed suicide in 2012 the rights to Barger’s book reverted to its author and Fox 2000 retained the first right to refuse any movie made from it.
According to the entertainment website Deadline.com, the movie will be produced by Barger’s advisor and confidant Fritz Clapp and by veteran producer Ben Myron, whose last film was Cheaper By The Dozen 2 which was released in 2005.