Usually I only mention casting news to mock bad choices, but I am really intrigued by a report that Focus Features has signed the elusive Bill Murray to play President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Roger Michell’s upcoming film “Hyde Park on Hudson.”

Based on a British radio play, the story is set against the visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (the one later known as the Queen Mother, not the present monarch) to the Roosevelt estate near Hyde Park in 1939.

 “Over the course of the weekend visit, which took place the summer before World War II broke out, details of FDR’s private life begin to unfold, including his affair with his cousin Daisy,” Variety reports.

The report does not identify who will be playing George or Elizabeth. I’m guessing that Focus (which is selling rights at the Cannes film market) won’t be able to afford to get Oscar-winner Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter to reprise their roles from “The King’s Speech.”

I’ve long been interested in this particular royal visit, since the Windsors reputedly passed by a house I used to own on Ocean Avenue (Route 36) in Sea Bright, New Jersey. They were on their way from the train station in Red Bank (where there’s a plaque commemorating their arrival following a rail trip from Washington) to the Coast Guard station at Sandy Hook, from whence George and Elizabeth boarded a boat to Hyde Park. The Roosevelt visit was commemorated by the Rogers and Hart song “Off the Record” — or at least the revised version sung by James Cagney in “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”