Aside from Clint Eastwood, some of my earliest memories of cinema feature the legendary Steve McQueen.  Seeing him display such casual coolness in Sunday afternoon airings of movies like The Great Escape, Bullitt, Hell is for Heroes, The Towering Inferno and The Getaway is what made me want to become an actor in the first place.

Of course, one of the few things I learned in college is that I’m actually a really lousy actor, but that doesn’t diminish McQueen’s status as the epitome of Hollywood cool.  He played hard, was a student of Bruce Lee, went the rounds with hot women, and loved cars and motorcycles, all of which makes him easy to admire for a guy like me.  And now, some 25 years after he exited the screen for good, we’ll get a small posthumous breath of creativity from McQueen — a legacy project called Yucatan has been unearthed and maneuvered into production at Warner Bros.

McQueen offspring Chad found storyboards and notes (around 1700 pages worth) in father Steve’s vault, setting up the heist flick (in which McQueen had planned to star, but alas The Hunter would be his final film) about a gang of thieves seeking a stash of long-buried Mayan treasure on the Yucatan peninsula.  Producer David Heyman has scribe Paul Scheuring (whose upcoming Fox series Prison Break is getting some positive buzz) doing location research and zooming through a first draft.

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