Stone Aims for Bin Laden

Tue., Oct. 17, 2006 4:09 PM PDT by Josh Grossberg

Oliver Stone is gunning for Osama bin Laden.

After playing up the heroism of New York's Finest in the well-received, relatively controversy-free World Trade Center, Stone has plans for another September 11-themed project—this one focusing on the al Qaeda mastermind.

The multiple Oscar winner, who first flirted with the idea of an Osama-centric film shortly after the terror attacks, has joined forces with Paramount Pictures to option Jawbreaker, a book tracing the United States' 2001 invasion of Afghanistan that toppled the Taliban regime and the ill-fated hunt for the terror leader, who eluded capture at Tora Bora.

Like World Trade Center, which managed to steer clear of casting blame—instead dramatizing the harrowing tale of two Port Authority police officers (Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena) struggling to stay alive after being buried beneath the rubble of the Twin Towers, Jawbreaker will attempt to eschew the political decision-making and focus on the efforts of the CIA and Special Operations Forces on the battlefield.

Or at least he'll try.

"It has the potential to be very exciting. There's a lot of action and a thriller element that we're still trying to bring out," Stone told Variety. "I'm not looking to make a political movie, but it always seems to come down to that with me."

Jawbreaker was written by Gary Berntsen, the CIA officer in charge of a secret U.S. paramilitary outfit code-named Jawbreaker that fought alongside the Northern Alliance.

While touted as a memoir, the author sparked a political firestorm by claiming the Bush administration botched the capture of bin Laden, allowing the most-wanted terrorist alive to escape his mountain hideout in the country's Tora Bora region.

As a result of the intense debate, Stone and the studio worked to keep word of the book deal under wraps. The director said he plans to make a "compelling drama" and leave it up to viewers to draw their own conclusions as to what might have gone wrong.

"This will be partly about the ground war in Afghanistan, among other things," Stone told Variety. "We've been discreet because we didn't want World Trade Center to be affected unnecessarily by political bulls--t about Afghanistan."

Perhaps hoping to blunt attacks from the right, Stone has hired Cyrus Nowrasteh, the writer and producer behind ABC's highly controversial docudrama The Path to 9/11, to handle screenplay chores.

A self-avowed conservative, Nowrasteh came under furious attack from, among others, former Clinton administration officials, Democrats in Congress and liberal bloggers for supposedly playing fast and loose with the facts to make the Clinton administration appear more culpable in the terror attacks.

Nowrasteh will write a second draft of Jawbreaker, picking up where Ralph Pezzullo and Bernsten left off.

Stone said he has not yet decided what his next directing gig will be, noting that Jawbreaker is one of several films he has in development.

In the meantime, the 53-year-old filmmaker has watched World Trade Center rake in $125 million worldwide and emerge as a possible Oscar contender—quite the turnaround after 2003's Alexander, which was something of a financial disaster.

If all goes well, Paramount is targeting Jawbreaker for release sometime in late 2007 or potentially during the heat of the 2008 presidential campaign season.