Crazy Heart writer-director Scott Cooper continues to attach himself to new projects.  Last week he replaced Noah Baumbach to direct The Emperor's Children, and he's also attached to Carancho, The Pale Blue Eye, and Out of the Furnace.  Deadline reports that he's now set to direct and possibly write an adaptation of Mark Seal's non-fiction book The Man in the Rockefeller Suit.  The story is "about a German-born conman Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter who passed himself off as a member of the Rockefeller clan and got away with it for decades."

This is great material for a movie and hopefully Cooper can make it work.  Crazy Heart is still his only directing credit and that movie will be remembered mainly for Jeff Bridges' performance.  The casting of The Emperor's Children will determine whether or not Cooper pens the script for Rockefeller Suit. Hit the jump for more details on Gerhartsreiter's tale and the official synopsis for the book.

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Per Deadline, Gerhartsreiter "got jobs on Wall Street, married a rising star businesswoman and traveled in rarefied social circles. His scam finally unraveled when his 12-year marriage ended and he was arrested for kidnapping his daughter. From there, his ruse fell apart and the bogus trail led back to the disappearance of a couple in California in the 1980."

Here's the official synopsis for Mark Seal's The Man in the Rockefeller Suit:

A real-life Talented Mr. Ripley, the unbelievable thirty-year run of a shape-shifting con man.

The story of Clark Rockefeller is a stranger-than-fiction twist on the classic American success story of the self-made man-because Clark Rockefeller was totally made up. The career con man who convincingly passed himself off as Rockefeller was born in a small village in Germany. At seventeen, obsessed with getting to America, he flew into the country on dubious student visa documents and his journey of deception began.

Over the next thirty years, boldly assuming a series of false identities, he moved up the social ladder through exclusive enclaves on both coasts-culminating in a stunning twelve-year marriage to a rising star businesswoman with a Harvard MBA who believed she'd wed a Rockefeller.

The imposter charmed his way into exclusive clubs and financial institutions-working on Wall Street, showing off an extraordinary art collection-until his marriage ended and he was arrested for kidnapping his daughter, which exposed his past of astounding deceptions as well as a connection to the bizarre disappearance of a California couple in the mid-1980s.

The story of The Man in the Rockefeller Suit is a probing and cinematic exploration of an audacious imposer-and a man determined to live the American dream by any means necessary.