(Photo: Getty Images, Kevin Winter)

According to Birth.Movies.Death., Matt Damon has signed on to star in Charlatan, a movie about a man named John Romulus Brinkley who claimed to be a doctor in the early 1900s and ended up killing a number of people with his fraudulent—yet oddly crowd-pleasing—medical advice. As spoiled by the headline up there, his big claim to fame was inventing a cure for male impotence that involved inserting goat testicles into humans, presumably so they could absorb all of the excess goat energy into their human genitals. Unfortunately, a bunch of people ended up dying from his operations and he lost his medical license (which wasn’t real to begin with), but not before he could get rich and try to become a politician. He later lost all of his money to malpractice and wrongful death suits, so it all worked out.


Back to the movie, it’s based on Pope Brock book Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, The Man Who Pursued Him, And The Age Of Flimflam, and the script is coming from Ocean’s Thirteen writers Brian Koppelman and David Levien. No director is attached yet.