Capitalism, F*CK YEAH! With Bin Laden dead and everyone celebrating, obviously it’s time for Hollywood to get into the Bin Laden-is-dead business. Luckily, it just so happens they already have a few Bin Laden projects in some stage of development. It’s almost as if this has been ten years in the making. Here’s the rundown from Deadline:
I’ve learned that Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow in recent weeks has been preparing and starting to cast an indie movie with the working title Kill Bin Laden, while another movie project about the hunt for the Al Queda terrorist leader at a major Hollywood studio stalled back in 2006.
Bigelow and Mark Boal, her collaborator on The Hurt Locker, have been mobilizing their film to go into production as their follow-up to that Best Picture Academy Award winner. Their movie as planned was based on an earlier unsuccessful mission [to kill Bin Laden]. Mind you, reps for Bigelow have told me previously that this movie isn’t specifically about the Al Qaeda leader. A lot of details about this film are stilll sketchy and secret, but I’ve heard that Megan Ellison, daughter of Oracle chief Larry Ellison, is ready to fund it.
Meanwhile, back in 2006, Paramount Pictures optioned Jawbreaker, a book by U.S. intelligence operative Gary Berntsen about the December 2001 American-led military mission to hunt and kill Bin Laden right during the opening stages of the 9/11-prompted invasion of Afghanistan that the author as the CIA pointman had helped coordinate with Special Operations Forces. The heavily vetted book detailed how close those forces came to finding and executing Bin Laden in the rugged mountains of Tora Bora until they were pulled back after a decision was made to let Pakistan tribal leaders lead the search — a decision experts felt helped Bin Laden get away.
That last one was originally set to be directed by Oliver Stone, and who knows, it may have turned out every bit as incomprehensible and terrible as Wall Street 2, once his team of coked-up spider monkey screenwriters got a hold of it. Shame that’s not happening. You’ll also notice, all these projects were once planned as downer, destined-to-bomb political stories like Fair Game or Lions for Lambs, but now execs everywhere are jizzing their pants because they have a happy, patriotic ending. It’d be like if Valkyrie ended with Tom Cruise flying out of Germany with a jet pack, flipping the bird with both hands.