His retelling of late ’70s local politics, civil rights battles and murder bagged him an Oscar. Now gay screenwriter and amateur porn star Dustin Lance Black is widening his scope and stepping back further in time to pen the story of paranoid, closeted and cross-dressing (allegedly) former head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, for a planned movie biopic.

It gets better: none other than death-defying Dirty Harry himself, Clint Eastwood, is inking on to direct. So with Dustin’s statuette (and by that I mean his Academy Award) added to Clint’s impressive haul, that’s a lot of Oscar weight behind this project and with such an intriguing and murky character to explore, how can this gay interest movie fail?

Actually, it’ll be interesting to see how they handle Hoover’s suspected gayness and fondness for wearing women’s clothing in their movie – with Lance Black behind the word processor it seems likely that the gay elements will be fully explored, but then, as you would expect of the guy who used to run America’s most secret organisation, so much of Hoover’s life is rumour and hearsay.

It’s not been said whether this new movie will cover Hoover’s entire 40-plus years as Mr. FBI or look at a smaller slice of his life – there are so many events surrounding him that could easily form the basis of a movie in themselves.

Maybe Lance Black’s script will focus on the personal contradiction of a closeted, gay man ruthlessly cracking down on the civil rights movement – in fact, had Hoover still been alive and running things during Harvey Milk’s brief stint in public office it’s certain he would have kept a secret file on the gay, San Francisco politician.

Whatever form this movie eventually takes, I’m already looking forward to it – nearly as much as Steven Soderbergh’s Liberace project starring Michael Douglas!