I vaguely remember hearing a few years back that somebody was shopping around a movie proposal about the life of Jack Kevorkian, known to the world as "Dr. Death." Well, gulp, here it is, ready or not.

According to Variety, originally, and confirmed by a series of subsequent reports, Al Pacino will play Kevorkian, who was paroled after serving eight years of a 10-25 years sentence for second-degree murder. Kevorkian beat the system for years until he decided to go on "60 Minutes" with a videotape showing him lethally injecting Thomas Youk, a man with Lou Gehrig's disease. The show ran November 22, 1998, which was not only the end of "sweeps" week but also the 35th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

"Prosecuted by the man who, ironically, was elected on a promise to leave Kevorkian alone, the killer was convicted of murder and sentenced to prison," as bioethicist Wesley Smith has written.

"The presiding judge told him, 'Consider yourself stopped.'"

Pacino, of course, is one of the greatest actors of his generation. Although the range of roles he has undertaken is enormous, Pacino reached the pinnacle of his career in playing Michael Corleone, the pathological "Godfather," who dispatches his rivals with a cold-blooded and dispassionate efficiency that still makes me recoil in horror.

According to the reports, the HBO movie "will cover his career as he builds his 'mercy machine' used to assist in the suicides, conducts his first doctor assisted suicide and his battle to defend a patient's right to die." We're told the script is "loosely based on the book by Neal Nicol "Between the Dying and the Dead: Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the Assisted Suicide Machine and the Battle to Legalize Euthanasia." The director will be Barry Levinson.

Just a few points of clarification, drawn largely from Wesley's extensive myth-busting truth-telling about Kevorkian.

1. That Hollywood would once again find it in its collective heart to embrace Kevorkian is no surprise. Kevorkian was hailed as the courageous rebel, whose guiding star was "helping" "terminally ill" patients die "peacefully." But as Wesley has pointed out, "Jack Kevorkian assisted the suicides of at least 130 people." Most of them were reportedly not terminally ill and five of them were reportedly not sick, according to autopsies. Although Kevorkian wrote extensively and was brutally candid, few reporters ever discussed his ultimate goal--"what he called 'obitiatry,' that is, experimenting on living human beings before they were euthanized," according to Smith.

2. The book on which the movie will be loosely based was co-written "by Kevorkian acolyte Neal Nicol -- a man so devoted to his mentor that he once allowed Kevorkian to infuse him with cadaver blood, resulting in a nasty case of hepatitis," Smith has written. And, oh by the way, the names of "A" list actors were floated as early as 2005 with Ben Kingsley {"Gandhi") being mentioned.

3. You notice that the movie ends early in the carnage. That way, for example, they won't have to figure out how to portray a man who, when asked by the Oakland Press what Mr. Youk's last words were, laughed and responded, "I don't know. I never understood a thing he said."

Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com.

Part One