WAR BOOK/WAR MOVIE DEALS: Intelligence-insulting crap, so Hollywood demurs
Today's Calendar section in the LA Times featured "Iraq outside the greenlight zone," a piece on how Hollywood's not thrilled to make movies from books on the Iraq war.
"Getting books about the war made into films has become a struggle," opens the article.
That's not hard to intuit. Any movie made off an optioned book coming off the Iraq war will have to deal with dissonance in the theatre, if it can even get people into the theatre.
One must make the risky assumption that average Americans might want to see a movie entitled "Curve Ball," about the dissembling Iraqi petty crook who was one of our nation's so-called primary intelligence "assets" prior to the war.
How do you turn a national embarrassment and loser who no one has seen into ninety or one hundred twenty minutes that leaves patrons talking about it with their neighbors and friends?
You probably can't. There's no help from the preponderance of mainstream TV news that has already dealt with "Curveball."
People often look to movies to have morals, sometimes even in splatter films. Anyone who has heard of Curveball knows there are no morals in this story. And many people would assume that any movie which requires a character or characters to ascribe depth and morals to a "Curveball" to be tortured in the extreme.
The only reason why "Curveball" is being made is because Bob Drogin, a reporter for the LA Times and the author of book it's being optioned from, must have a powerful agent.
In Santa Barbara last weekend, DD browsed the books on the Iraq war and purchased Cobra II, mentioned earlier this week.
Drogin's "Curveball" was also on the shelves. And it was pretty much dead-on-arrival in stores, along with many brethren on the Iraq war.
For instance, how many books on the glory of commando operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, written by the semi-literate-special-ops-man-turned-Hemingway, do we need? Ten, twenty, thirty? More?
That's a lot of potential movie fodder going against the grain of what the majority perceive to be a lost war and ink stain on the national character.
"The Bomb In My Garden" is also said to be coming to theatres, optioned from the book of the same name by someone called Kurt Pitzer.
DD laughed out loud when reading about the conceit of it in the newspaper.
"The Bomb In My Garden" is the autobiography of "Mahdi Obeidi, [Saddam Hussein's] former nuclear scientist..."
Mahdi Obeidi, huh?
Naturally, there's another serious disconnect at work. Saddam Hussein didn't have the bomb, or any weapons of mass destruction, when we attacked him.
This piece -- here -- was about the best the so-called "bomb in the garden" story could do.
Naturally, there never was a bomb in the garden. Obeidi just had pieces of a gas centrifuge and plans which had been buried for years.
"[Obeidi] told me that he never worked on a nuclear program after 1991," reported CNN.
Of course, at the time the story ran -- in June of 2003 -- US government teams were still desperately trying to find evidence of WMDs.
However, the writing was on the wall.
Even though Mahdi Obeidi, who few Americans remember, tried to justify a war that was coming unbuttoned even as he was blabbing to American journalists, it didn't stick. In a New York Times op-ed piece, one that pimped "The Bomb in My Garden," Obeidi wrote: "Threat is always a matter of perception, but our nuclear program could have been reinstated at the snap of Saddam Hussein's fingers."
Even CNN had to admit of Obeidi and his buried crap: "Find is not smoking gun."
Would you pay ten dollars to see a biopic about this old duffer? We f-----' doubt it.
Who will play Iraqi old duffer/nuclear scientist, Mahdi Obeidi?
It's not an inconsequential question for Hollywood.
The Los Angeles Times piece lends some insight into how it's going down.
It has to be a movie about someone more sympathetic. How 'bout the journalist who got Mahdi Obeidi to America? Yeah, that's the ticket!
And it will be done by Johnny Depp's production company, Infinitum Nihil.
Perhaps Johnny Depp can be had to play the journalist, doing a variation on his riff off gonzo Hunter Thompson in "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas" mixed with a little of the annoying but good-hearted drug pusher, George Jung, from "Blow."
"The [Mahdi Obeidi] book appeared to be a good fit for Depp's production company," wrote the Times.
"But the story had to be expanded beyond Obeidi's account and focus on Pitzer's efforts to help the scientist and his family flee Baghdad."
Telephone calls were made to Los Angeles "[and] I could tell that drama captivated them," said Pitzer, somewhat self-servingly to the newspaper.
Another book being made into a movie is "Thunder Run," by David Zucchino. Zucchino is also a LA Times reporter. That makes two of them with movies, including the author of "Curveball."
"Thunder Run" did not burn up the charts.
"The narrative focuses on the men who commanded and battled in the tank battles as the Americans fought their way to Iraq's capital city," reads one blurb for "Thunder Run" from the publishing industry. "It is often not a pretty picture, nor one for the faint of heart, because Zucchino unhesitatingly and graphically describes the violent and grisly fates that befell hundreds, if not thousands, of Iraqi Republican Guard troops and fedayeen militiamen, their Syrian allies (at the border) and the unfortunate civilians who were killed or wounded by the deadly high-tech American armored vehicles and their well-trained crews."
Yeah, that sure was just great, wasn't it? (Incidentally, Cobra II devotes one chapter to the subject of the Thunder Run.)
Most of any potential movie audience knows the punchline to this story. The US government and military ran into the endzone and ripped down the goal posts well before the game was over.
Many readers may get the motivations for these potential war pics by now. They're hardly about "You've read the book, now see the movie!"
And they're not about making good films, stories which uplift while getting people communally into the theatre. They're about maximizing book projects, squeezing some extra blood from stones that didn't yield so much on the first try.
The original from the LAT.
Here's the basic outline for the absolutely spell-binding "Bomb in My Garden."
From a magazine article in Mother Jones, it contains the usual copy on the story of the danger of unsecured scientists and nuclear proliferation. The script is always the same and while there's truth to it, it has been repeated so often it's no longer interesting.
Yes, Virginia, there are scientists who work in other countries for state-run nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and when things go bad they all want to come to America.
And then you get the book deal for some of the most famous so that they may furnish their tell-alls and the monotonous handwringing about how these elegant scientists -- we should grab them and pay them to work for us at once, so they don't run off and work for our many other enemies.
DD thinks most people, after hearing this script once or twice inwardly squirm and turn away. The idea, essentially, is to bribe someone into being a good boy. It also has the look and feel of a shakedown.
How many US scientists in possession of potentially dangerous knowledge get bonus pay and other incentives and embellishments so they don't go over to the dark side?
Anyway, dear readers, get a load of these made-for-the-big-screen moments:
"Between its unemployed scientists and the disappearance of large amounts of WMD-related materials from former weapons sites, Iraq now poses a nightmare scenario, according to Ray McGovern, who spent 27 years analyzing intelligence for the CIA and afterward cofounded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. 'The danger is much more acute, both from the proliferation side and the terrorism side,' McGovern says. 'Before we invaded, there was no evidence that Iraq had any plan or incentive to proliferate. They didn't even have a current plan to develop WMDs. They just hadn't been doing it. Now, my God, we have a magnet attracting all manner of foreign jihadists to a place where the WMD expertise is suddenly unprotected. It just boggles the mind."
"In the weeks after the invasion, I got to know [Mahdi] Obeidi quite well. He was no Dr. Strangelove. He loved science and the pure logic of an engineering challenge..."
"He said he detested Saddam ... "
They always detest their maximum leaders. (See Ken Alibek et al.)
Scintillating possibilities for human drama here.
Can see first line in potential movie review at the LA Times in 2008: "Although he was Saddam's Dr. Strangelove, all Mahdi Obeidi wanted to do was to come to the United States with his family and pursue the American dream. 'The Bomb in My Garden' tells the story of Obeidi's flight from war-torn Iraq, first dodging bombs and bullets in the rubble-strewn streets of Baghdad, then probing the corridors of Washington, DC, where the intrepid scientist and his journalist friend struggled to inform policy makers about looming nuclear catastrophe despite walls of bureaucratic indifference."
"There are a number of people who could be brought here, at least temporarily, and make positive contributions to this society," [Obeidi] said. "These are very educated and skillful scientists. Surely this great nation could absorb a few more talented people ..."
OK! Book deals, movie options and scientific welfare for everyone so they don't work at blowing us up!
Knowledgeable readers may know there was one exception to the rule. Gerald Bull.
Gerald Bull was a scientist who worked developing high performance artillery for various projects sponsored by the Pentagon and Canada.
When these projects dried up, the CIA helped to arrange for the sale of his expertise to South Africa. When he was later arrested and jailed for illegal arms dealing to South Africa, the CIA let him be hung out to dry.
Upon emergence from jail, Bull went to work developing a "supergun" -- a giant artillery piece -- for Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Upon hearing of it, Israeli forces assassinated him, effectively ending the project.
Although books were written and one TV movie made -- The Doomsday Gun -- starring Frank Langella as Bull, the scientist was -- in a manner of speaking -- disinvited from his pursuit of the good life.
Today's Calendar section in the LA Times featured "Iraq outside the greenlight zone," a piece on how Hollywood's not thrilled to make movies from books on the Iraq war.
"Getting books about the war made into films has become a struggle," opens the article.
That's not hard to intuit. Any movie made off an optioned book coming off the Iraq war will have to deal with dissonance in the theatre, if it can even get people into the theatre.
One must make the risky assumption that average Americans might want to see a movie entitled "Curve Ball," about the dissembling Iraqi petty crook who was one of our nation's so-called primary intelligence "assets" prior to the war.
How do you turn a national embarrassment and loser who no one has seen into ninety or one hundred twenty minutes that leaves patrons talking about it with their neighbors and friends?
You probably can't. There's no help from the preponderance of mainstream TV news that has already dealt with "Curveball."
People often look to movies to have morals, sometimes even in splatter films. Anyone who has heard of Curveball knows there are no morals in this story. And many people would assume that any movie which requires a character or characters to ascribe depth and morals to a "Curveball" to be tortured in the extreme.
The only reason why "Curveball" is being made is because Bob Drogin, a reporter for the LA Times and the author of book it's being optioned from, must have a powerful agent.
In Santa Barbara last weekend, DD browsed the books on the Iraq war and purchased Cobra II, mentioned earlier this week.
Drogin's "Curveball" was also on the shelves. And it was pretty much dead-on-arrival in stores, along with many brethren on the Iraq war.
For instance, how many books on the glory of commando operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, written by the semi-literate-special-ops-man-turned-Hemingway, do we need? Ten, twenty, thirty? More?
That's a lot of potential movie fodder going against the grain of what the majority perceive to be a lost war and ink stain on the national character.
"The Bomb In My Garden" is also said to be coming to theatres, optioned from the book of the same name by someone called Kurt Pitzer.
DD laughed out loud when reading about the conceit of it in the newspaper.
"The Bomb In My Garden" is the autobiography of "Mahdi Obeidi, [Saddam Hussein's] former nuclear scientist..."
Mahdi Obeidi, huh?
Naturally, there's another serious disconnect at work. Saddam Hussein didn't have the bomb, or any weapons of mass destruction, when we attacked him.
This piece -- here -- was about the best the so-called "bomb in the garden" story could do.
Naturally, there never was a bomb in the garden. Obeidi just had pieces of a gas centrifuge and plans which had been buried for years.
"[Obeidi] told me that he never worked on a nuclear program after 1991," reported CNN.
Of course, at the time the story ran -- in June of 2003 -- US government teams were still desperately trying to find evidence of WMDs.
However, the writing was on the wall.
Even though Mahdi Obeidi, who few Americans remember, tried to justify a war that was coming unbuttoned even as he was blabbing to American journalists, it didn't stick. In a New York Times op-ed piece, one that pimped "The Bomb in My Garden," Obeidi wrote: "Threat is always a matter of perception, but our nuclear program could have been reinstated at the snap of Saddam Hussein's fingers."
Even CNN had to admit of Obeidi and his buried crap: "Find is not smoking gun."
Would you pay ten dollars to see a biopic about this old duffer? We f-----' doubt it.
Who will play Iraqi old duffer/nuclear scientist, Mahdi Obeidi?
It's not an inconsequential question for Hollywood.
The Los Angeles Times piece lends some insight into how it's going down.
It has to be a movie about someone more sympathetic. How 'bout the journalist who got Mahdi Obeidi to America? Yeah, that's the ticket!
And it will be done by Johnny Depp's production company, Infinitum Nihil.
Perhaps Johnny Depp can be had to play the journalist, doing a variation on his riff off gonzo Hunter Thompson in "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas" mixed with a little of the annoying but good-hearted drug pusher, George Jung, from "Blow."
"The [Mahdi Obeidi] book appeared to be a good fit for Depp's production company," wrote the Times.
"But the story had to be expanded beyond Obeidi's account and focus on Pitzer's efforts to help the scientist and his family flee Baghdad."
Telephone calls were made to Los Angeles "[and] I could tell that drama captivated them," said Pitzer, somewhat self-servingly to the newspaper.
Another book being made into a movie is "Thunder Run," by David Zucchino. Zucchino is also a LA Times reporter. That makes two of them with movies, including the author of "Curveball."
"Thunder Run" did not burn up the charts.
"The narrative focuses on the men who commanded and battled in the tank battles as the Americans fought their way to Iraq's capital city," reads one blurb for "Thunder Run" from the publishing industry. "It is often not a pretty picture, nor one for the faint of heart, because Zucchino unhesitatingly and graphically describes the violent and grisly fates that befell hundreds, if not thousands, of Iraqi Republican Guard troops and fedayeen militiamen, their Syrian allies (at the border) and the unfortunate civilians who were killed or wounded by the deadly high-tech American armored vehicles and their well-trained crews."
Yeah, that sure was just great, wasn't it? (Incidentally, Cobra II devotes one chapter to the subject of the Thunder Run.)
Most of any potential movie audience knows the punchline to this story. The US government and military ran into the endzone and ripped down the goal posts well before the game was over.
Many readers may get the motivations for these potential war pics by now. They're hardly about "You've read the book, now see the movie!"
And they're not about making good films, stories which uplift while getting people communally into the theatre. They're about maximizing book projects, squeezing some extra blood from stones that didn't yield so much on the first try.
The original from the LAT.
Here's the basic outline for the absolutely spell-binding "Bomb in My Garden."
From a magazine article in Mother Jones, it contains the usual copy on the story of the danger of unsecured scientists and nuclear proliferation. The script is always the same and while there's truth to it, it has been repeated so often it's no longer interesting.
Yes, Virginia, there are scientists who work in other countries for state-run nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and when things go bad they all want to come to America.
And then you get the book deal for some of the most famous so that they may furnish their tell-alls and the monotonous handwringing about how these elegant scientists -- we should grab them and pay them to work for us at once, so they don't run off and work for our many other enemies.
DD thinks most people, after hearing this script once or twice inwardly squirm and turn away. The idea, essentially, is to bribe someone into being a good boy. It also has the look and feel of a shakedown.
How many US scientists in possession of potentially dangerous knowledge get bonus pay and other incentives and embellishments so they don't go over to the dark side?
Anyway, dear readers, get a load of these made-for-the-big-screen moments:
"Between its unemployed scientists and the disappearance of large amounts of WMD-related materials from former weapons sites, Iraq now poses a nightmare scenario, according to Ray McGovern, who spent 27 years analyzing intelligence for the CIA and afterward cofounded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. 'The danger is much more acute, both from the proliferation side and the terrorism side,' McGovern says. 'Before we invaded, there was no evidence that Iraq had any plan or incentive to proliferate. They didn't even have a current plan to develop WMDs. They just hadn't been doing it. Now, my God, we have a magnet attracting all manner of foreign jihadists to a place where the WMD expertise is suddenly unprotected. It just boggles the mind."
"In the weeks after the invasion, I got to know [Mahdi] Obeidi quite well. He was no Dr. Strangelove. He loved science and the pure logic of an engineering challenge..."
"He said he detested Saddam ... "
They always detest their maximum leaders. (See Ken Alibek et al.)
Scintillating possibilities for human drama here.
Can see first line in potential movie review at the LA Times in 2008: "Although he was Saddam's Dr. Strangelove, all Mahdi Obeidi wanted to do was to come to the United States with his family and pursue the American dream. 'The Bomb in My Garden' tells the story of Obeidi's flight from war-torn Iraq, first dodging bombs and bullets in the rubble-strewn streets of Baghdad, then probing the corridors of Washington, DC, where the intrepid scientist and his journalist friend struggled to inform policy makers about looming nuclear catastrophe despite walls of bureaucratic indifference."
"There are a number of people who could be brought here, at least temporarily, and make positive contributions to this society," [Obeidi] said. "These are very educated and skillful scientists. Surely this great nation could absorb a few more talented people ..."
OK! Book deals, movie options and scientific welfare for everyone so they don't work at blowing us up!
Knowledgeable readers may know there was one exception to the rule. Gerald Bull.
Gerald Bull was a scientist who worked developing high performance artillery for various projects sponsored by the Pentagon and Canada.
When these projects dried up, the CIA helped to arrange for the sale of his expertise to South Africa. When he was later arrested and jailed for illegal arms dealing to South Africa, the CIA let him be hung out to dry.
Upon emergence from jail, Bull went to work developing a "supergun" -- a giant artillery piece -- for Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Upon hearing of it, Israeli forces assassinated him, effectively ending the project.
Although books were written and one TV movie made -- The Doomsday Gun -- starring Frank Langella as Bull, the scientist was -- in a manner of speaking -- disinvited from his pursuit of the good life.
posted by George Smith at 11:43 AM
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