REAL life happens when Hollywood is making other plans.
When US President Barack Obama announced on May 1 that a team of Navy SEAL commandos had finally found Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and shot him dead, the first thought that popped into some minds was: ''Who's going to make that movie?''
''It's a case of art imitating life,'' the head of the box-office division of Hollywood.com, Paul Dergarabedian, says. ''A lot of people thought the operation itself sounded very cinematic, like a plot out of a Hollywood movie, and the fact that it happened in real life is just astounding.''
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The film industry has proved itself adept at pivoting when real-life events present movie-making opportunities. But as it happens, some filmmakers were already at work on bin Laden-inspired movies, which now look more marketable than ever.
One of the first out will be Act of Valour, scheduled for February. An action thriller featuring real-life commandos, the story will follow a squad of SEALs on a covert mission to recover a kidnapped CIA agent, which then turns into a race to take down a web of terrorist cells.
The film, which co-stars Roselyn Sanchez (Rush Hour 2) and Emilio Rivera (Traffic), was made with navy approval and support.
But the bin Laden film getting the most attention doesn't even have a name yet and won't be out until just before the 2012 presidential election. Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, the creative team behind The Hurt Locker, were planning a movie about the special forces and intelligence commandos who were hunting for bin Laden but they had not yet finished the research. Now they're rewriting to incorporate the latest developments, with a release tentatively planned for October next year.
A movie based on a book, former SEAL sniper Howard Wasdin's SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy Sniper, is also in the works, having been optioned by action star Vin Diesel and his production company, One Race Films. The book is Wasdin's account of his time on the team as a sniper during Operation Desert Storm and in Somalia. There is no script yet but the project is said to be in hurry-up mode.
Even before bin Laden's death, SEAL stories were big in bookstores and at the box office. Just days after the announcement of the operation, the Walt Disney Co. tried to trademark the term ''Seal Team 6''. They dropped the plan out of deference to the navy but the attempt to lock up a military title is an indication of what Hollywood thinks will be of interest to audiences.
''After 9/11, people did not rush to make movies. There was a question of how soon is too soon. But this is quite the opposite,'' Dergarabedian says. ''There are no concerns about being insensitive to get a movie out as quickly as possible, because people are excited and very curious about how the operation took place. It's a catharsis for people to see this
Source:Sydney Morning Herald
