[Kathryn] 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 try to kill the Al Qaeda leader responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attack on America as he hid in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. But now they’ve certainly got a celebratory ending to that dramatic story with tonight’s announcement that the U.S. conducted a military operation that killed Bin Laden. …

[B]ack 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. The studio hired The Path To 9/11 scribe Cyrus Nowrasteh to rewrite a first draft by Berntsen’s co-author Ralph Pezzullo, and Oliver Stone had eyed it as a follow-up to his film World Trade Center. But the project stalled.

Much more here.

His current anti-soldier hit piece, The Kill Team, is about a group of disgraceful scumbags in Afghanistan who decided to murder several civilians.  With it, Boal seems to be following his tried and true formula – write something for publication in a past-its-prime magazine that makes American troops look like cro-magnons then work to turn it into a movie.  He took a Playboy article on Americans murdering each other and soon we had In the Valley of Elah.  You may have seen it – though the odds are stacked against it.  It was ignored by popular demand.

Another article, this one on bomb disposal experts, became The Hurt Locker, which took some of the bravest and most dedicated people in our armed forces and made them out as undisciplined, drunken, unprofessional clowns.  In fact, Boal got sued by one of the guys he allegedly wrote about.  To be fair, it did win an Academy Award . . . from the same band of geniuses who passed over Saving Private Ryan in favor of Shakespeare In Love and once picked as “Best Song” the unforgettable hit “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.”  So, there’s that.

Boal’s technique is to chronicle the most degenerate fringes of the warfighters’ experience and repackage the most sordid episodes as its totality.  One can easily imagine the Rolling Stone editors eager for the chance to please their dwindling audience of aging Garfunkel-digging hippies and Chomsky-devouring clove-smokers with another prejudice-reinforcing piece about how those Middle-American Army guys are barely one step above gorillas.  Rolling Stone even promises a glimpse at the grim photos the mean old Pentagon doesn’t want you to see – as if there was some moral imperative for the military to provide gist for the jihadi propaganda mill.  Hey, that’s Boal and Rolling Stones’ job!

What is particularly cunning in his approach is that there is no excuse for the crimes these savages committed, and Boal uses this fact to deflect any kind of perspective.  Hundreds of thousands of young, heavily-armed and stressed American men and women have served overseas since 9/11.  Several dozen have murdered people.  You won’t find any city in America with a murder rate like that for that demographic. 

Michael Yon, who has embedded with the unit involved, sums up his feelings in the title of his response: “Calling BULLSHIT on ‘Rolling Stone’”.  Unlike the chaotic rabble Boal imagines, the unit Yon embedded with was squared away and effective.  Yon’s critique of the story is devastating and deserves a close read.  And Yon knows what he is talking about; in contrast, when Boal makes obvious errors, like referring to a battalion commander as the “battalion chief,” he self-identifies as a poser.   

For his part, Boal chooses to focus on one squad out of dozens, a handful of losers out of several thousand in a Stryker brigade, and to subtly extrapolate that the entire brigade was on some sort of rampage.  His article contains lots of hints about a greater, grander conspiracy, but offers nothing like convincing evidence to anyone familiar with either the law or the military.  In fact, it was the Army that investigated every aspect of the case.  The murderers are going to jail for decades, yet he leaves the impression that there was some sort of collective shrug of the shoulders on the part of the Army – despite the fact that the Army uncovered, investigated and prosecuted the case long before ace reporter Mark Boal appeared on the scene with Final Draft loaded on his iPad.

What’s missing from Boal’s article is the usual implication that these murders are simply a manifestation of some sort of malignant wink and nod from the very highest echelons of power.  Of course, with the Bu$Hitler/Cheney-satan cabal out of power, instead of the evil originating in the Halliburton-spawned machinations of the neo-con White House, today it simply bubbles up from the poisonous minds of those poor, benighted Americans unfortunate enough not to be born in New York City and who enlist for the sole purpose of living out their homicidal fantasies.  Boal’s nothing if not fully in tune with the expectations of his Hollywood masters.

Of course, there’s plenty of innuendo in there about the officer corps too; if he’s going to sell the screenplay, he needs some villains and the killers themselves are already slotted as the designated victims of a murderous American culture.  Boal describes ominously how the brigade commander, a decorated colonel, has critiqued the current counter-insurgency strategy.  Now, being part of the liberal media establishment, Boal is probably not used to the idea of diversity of thought.  Since he and all his friends think exactly alike, he probably can’t conceive that within the military community and its many professional journals there is a healthy and invaluable debate about the best way to fight a guerrilla war. 

The fact is that an infantry squad leader – the toughest job in the Army and one that should only be entrusted to leaders of the highest moral caliber – appears to have carefully surrounded himself with a small collection of thugs and weak-willed pawns and lived out his sick fantasies in a combat zone.  He is a disgrace to every NCO who ever wore stripes.  He and his band of misfits did their best to exploit the understandable and justified leeway given to troops in a hostile fire zone to hide their crimes.  Boal seems to see this tragedy as his next film credit; unfortunately, the American men and women in Afghanistan will be paying the price for these criminals’ actions – amplified by Boal’s breathless reporting – for a long time. 

The real story of American warriors in Afghanistan is one of courage and compassion, of bravery in the face of almost overwhelming challenges.  You won’t see that in Boal’s article or his movies.  The truth is off-message.  The truth doesn’t pay.

Let me share a story from Desert Storm 20 years ago that sums up the truth about American soldiers.  The ground war had just started and I had to go out to a field hospital in the middle of the desert to take care of some business.  I was in a tent with a young specialist who had – as American troops will do – decked it out pretty nicely.  Among his amenities, he had a small fridge packed with sodas running off a generator. 

There was an announcement that a Blackhawk was inbound with a lightly wounded Iraqi prisoner – the big, bad Army sent a crew in a multi-million dollar chopper forward to pick up an enemy with a minor injury to take him to an American hospital for treatment.  The specialist thought for a moment, went into his fridge and grabbed a Coke.  Then he looked at me and said, “Do you think he’d want one of these?”

That’s an American fighting man – an unequalled warrior in battle yet compassionate and kind when the shooting stops.  I’ve seen it.  Millions of other vets have seen it.  Millions of civilians all over the world have seen it – in fact, they are seeing it as we speak.  But we won’t see that in Boal’s next opus.  Boal knows what sells in Hollywood, and it sure as hell isn’t the truth.

Hasn’t it occurred to the overpaid and over-educated studio execs that the rest of America, minus the liberal bastions of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco, would probably pay to see Americans be the good guys again? Jerry Bruckheimer has a great Afghanistan War project called Horse Soldiers based on Doug Stanton’s incredible non-fiction book about the first teams of US Special Forces who led the Northern Alliance to victory over the Taliban – on horseback. With Bruckheimer behind the project it will have high potential for box office success, if Disney lets it see the light of day.

Producer Chris Godsick has been trying to get the World War II version of Horse Soldiers about the last combat charge of horseback US Cavalry made for a number of years. Colonel Ed Ramsey who led that heroic charge of the 26th Cavalry against the Japanese is a good friend of Godsick’s and an acquaintance of mine. I’ve actually filmed several hours of in-depth interviews with Colonel Ramsey for a possible documentary, yet we can’t get The History Channel to bite, “We aren’t doing those kind of shows any more.” No kidding, Ice truckers, pawnbrokers and UFOs are The History Channel’s stock-in-trade now. Ramsey is 94, a still sharp and vital 94, but Chris and I both would like for him to see he and his men’s real life courage celebrated on film before he goes off to Fiddlers Green, the cavalrymen’s Valhalla in the sky.

America — you know, all the rest of America out there in Oklahoma City, Denver, Houston and Nashville, Albuquerque and Sacramento — wants to see heroes, American heroes and not just comic book heroes. Successful political thriller author Vince Flynn, Extreme Measures and ten other extremely well written “war on terror” centered novels gets this. On the Glenn Beck show recently, Flynn described his Mitch Rapp, CIA counter terrorism hero as a CIA version of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. Rapp is a take no prisoners, break any law necessary and take any risk necessary to protect America kind of guy.

At least six of Flynn’s novels have made it to the New York Times Best Seller list, and he’s now made the number-one spot there as well. The amount of in depth research and his own innate understanding of the world his characters inhabit actually brought him under temporary scrutiny by the Secret Service and other top-level government security. Now the same government law enforcement and intelligence types are huge fans and often appropriate sources.

In a telling scene from Flynn’s Protect and Defend an enlightened but fictional centrist Democratic President tells Mitch Rapp:

“There are too many people in my party who think that violence is never the answer. It’s a very enlightening and alluring argument when made in a civil society that has a relatively efficient justice system. Even more so when unchallenged in the lecture halls of academia, but in the real world it’s a bunch of bullshit.”

Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura has the rights to Flynn’s Mitch Rapp character, but now according to Daily Variety no studio is going to want to make these films. Flynn himself has said that in most of his Hollywood meetings the first thing the studio execs want to do is change the bad guys from Muslim extremists to something far more politically correct. His books deal with the intelligence, front line and political war on terror today, who the hell do they think the antagonists are supposed to be, a twisted Santa Claus and a group of demented elves! It doesn’t mean Flynn or his hero hate Muslims, in fact there are often sympathetic and even heroic Muslim characters. It’s the extremists who are in Mitch Rapp’s gun sights. Lorenzo di Bonaventura gets Flynn and his hero, so there is hope. If the no-nonsense Mitch Rapp is cast right the film could make a fortune, but will the studios bite?

Vince Flynn

In the 1987 action thriller Wanted Dead or Alive Rutger Hauer’s former CIA operative, now a bounty hunter, catches a murderous Muslim terrorist played by Gene Simmons just before he sets off a bomb that would produce a poisonous gas cloud that could kill tens of thousand of Southern Californians. Simmons has also brutally killed Hauer’s police detective best friend. The bounty hunter leads out the terrorist with his hands bound and a live grenade shoved in Simmons’ mouth, the pin of which Hauer now has his finger through. Hauer tells the government types to send the reward to his late-friend’s family and he’ll keep the bonus for bringing in Malak Al Rahin alive. Then he has a change of heart and says, “Fuck the bonus,” pulling the pin on the grenade and exploding Simmons’ head in a ball of flame. It’s an incredibly satisfying film moment.

If studio execs today want to attract audiences they should think about more Rutger Hauer and Mitch Rapp-type heroes in their movies instead of corrupt Americans, bleeding hearts and left wing actors.

—–

No comment necessary. This is genius.

Blogging is easy!

Such was the case with my analysis of  The Hurt Locker. I loved the film. After watching it, however, the thing that bothered me was the quote at the beginning, “War is a drug.” In the end, it serves as the theme of the film, but I found it to be way off the mark, and not even supported by the film itself. To me, The Hurt Locker seemed to be clearly not about addiction, but about purpose. What would motivate someone to return to a horrific war zone, to face death and dismemberment on a daily basis? A sense of purpose. That is what motivates people, not “a rush.”

I set to writing. Then I read Walter Owen’s piece in Vanity Fair, who put it together better than I would have:

But the director of The Hurt Locker brings you close. Which makes all the more baffling the epigraph that fills the screen, a line of slipshod poesy by the respected war correspondent Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” That might have served as profound insight in Avatar, but in The Hurt Locker it only raises the question of how a director who could conceive such a spare and unremitting movie could also fall for such facile hokum.

I love that. And I wish I said it, because I love using phrases like “facile hokum.” But it bears repeating: The Hurt Locker is a great film, but it’s stated theme is way off base. Did the director and writer really believe this? I often find myself watching movies and saying, “I love this! But these filmmakers don’t seem to know what this film is about!”

That, I believe, is not the case with The Hurt Locker. I think that Katherine Bigelow and Mark Boal knew exactly what film they were making, and they knew that the quote was facile hokum, too. So why open the film with it? O.K., here’s where I get to have an original thought: The quote is marketing. It is there to give reviewers permission to praise the film. Just think what would happen if they made the exact same film, but opened with a quote from, say, Walter Owen:

As long as men still feel they are nothing without a call to duty, they will look for a place in the world where they find themselves excellent at something. One of those places is, and has always been, battle.

Critics would have hated it. It does not buy into their worldview, that soldiers are dumb rednecks who are forced to fight for their country because of lack of education and economic opportunity. They are victims. They are addicts.

The Hurt Locker does not portray these men as victims, but the quote at the beginning gives the critics cover – “It’s not their choice- it’s an addiction. They can’t help themselves.” That explains everything, including the film’s almost universal (and deserved) praise.

So kudos to Bigelow and Boal. They not only made a very watchable film, they played the press and Academy voters like a fiddle, which is, for me, even more fun to watch.

Last night, no one said anything insulting or divisive. Not a word. Not a sound. Not a peep. The whole of the Kodak Theatre offered a brief but completely unexpected respite in their ongoing Culture War against traditional America and chose instead to behave like, well, movie stars.

No idiocy directed our way in the form of poorly disguised jokes or irony, no hey-hey goodbye shots at Bush, no gushy shout-outs to Obama. With ObamaCare on the precipice there wasn’t even a lone moralizing salvo fired on its behalf or a cheap shot launched towards the Tea Parties, Sarah Palin, or Fox News. It was like someone gave a magic wand to those of us who want to like Hollywood again, and it worked. Because this is how it’s supposed to be.

For the first time in fifteen years – who knows how long, really – Hollywood showed some class; some real old-fashioned Movie Star Class. The question is, why? These are the same people who have been lashing out at us for as long as they’ve had the opportunity. Was there a memo? An act of God? A universal acknowledgement that it was time to rehabilitate their image with the large swath of potential customers this industry has worked so hard to relentlessly antagonize and insult?

Whatever the reason, let’s hope we saw the beginning of something. And let’s also hope for some kind of mass realization of the benefits that came from eliminating the smug aren’t we important speeches and the sanctimonious politicking and elitist hectoring that have become so predictable. None of this ever accomplished anything other than to hurt the aforementioned cause, turn “Hollywood” into a punchline, and further distance a once universally beloved town from their audience — an audience that asks only to be taken aways for a few hours of ooh-ahh glamor one night a year. And last night it felt almost as though someone in charge had figured that out.

This isn’t to say the show was good, (no one has that big of a magic wand), but Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were charming, self-deprecating, and had some great moments. Best of all were the rarities –actors who have managed to hold on to audience goodwill — taking home well-deserved trophies. After all, not only was it a night that gave us Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock to root for, they also won!

And James Cameron did not.

Nope, the man who should now be forever known as the ex-Mr. Bigelow never left his chair nor got near a microphone. Sure, “Avatar” earned a few technical awards but when it came to kudos for any category in a storytelling department, it was the King of the World forced to sit in his seat and look up at his betters. My issues with “The Hurt Locker” are well documented and “Up” was the best picture of the year by a very wide margin, but how nice it was to see director Katheryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal offer sincere appreciations to the American Military as the man who so cruelly smeared them (in neato 3-D!) and tried to marginalize Bigelow’s win as something having to do with history as opposed to her enormous talent, didn’t even rate a reaction shot. 

And it can only mean good things for movie lovers now that the once woefully under-appreciated Bigelow has finally reached the top-tier of Hollywood directors where she has always belonged. She’s not a female director, she’s a one-of-a-kind awesome director.

Last night a woman who played a gun-totin’, Southern Christian conservative won Best Actress, a film widely perceived as pro-troop won Best Picture, a tune with a twang won Best Song and for nearly four hours all of Hollywood presented themselves in the best way possible. Was it a temporary blip in the Matrix, a crack in the ideological door, or some kind of insidious left-wing plot to force me to get a real job?

Time will tell. But when the most off-putting part of an Oscar ceremony is the interpretive dance, something’s going on.

Like some grim tribal ritual whose original meaning is lost in the mists of time, I will most probably sit down in front of the tube at the appointed hour, and brace myself for the onslaught of awkward acceptance speeches, corny jokes, and interminable dance numbers (please, God, no dance numbers!).

The experts agree there are two main contenders for Best Picture.  (What would we do without experts?)  One is a movie about a peaceful, idyllic land invaded by an evil military force trying to steal their resources.  The other one is called Avatar.

The struggle between Avatar and The Hurt Locker has gone back and forth.  Avatar was an early favorite, but Hurt Locker seems to have enjoyed a late General Petraeus-like surge.

Then in the final days, an ugly controversy struck Hurt Locker as one of its producers had the gall to ask people to vote for his movie.  Imagine that!  Doesn’t he know that Hollywood is a respectable place where aggressive self-promotion and crass commercialism are strictly off-limits?

Incidentally, have you noticed there are virtually no children in the world of Avatar?  It’s kind of like Beverly Hills.  Apparently there is a unique species on Pandora that takes care of the Na’vi children so the adults can spend all their time riding air-dragons and chasing blue tail.  This child-caring species is known as the Nan’ni.

Picking Oscar winners is one way to make the ceremonies tolerable.  (Another is drinking heavily.)  Not to brag or anything, but I almost always win my Oscar party pools.  For some inexplicable reason, I don’t get invited to Oscar parties anymore.

Since nobody else here at Big Hollywood has taken up the baton, to me is left the thankless task of making Oscar predictions.  Adopt them at your own risk.  (My lawyer made me add that.)

Best Picture

Probable winner:  toss-up between Avatar and The Hurt Locker

Should win:  toss-up between Up and Inglourious Basterds [sic]

Notes:  This year ten films are nominated for Best Picture, and a new European-style runoff voting system is being implemented.  Some say Inglourious Basterds is a dark-horse contender (gloury hallelujah).  But it’s anybody’s guess which will win.  If I had to choose, I’d say Hurt Locker is a lock.  Or Avatar.

Best Director

Probable winner:  Kathryn Bigelow

Should win:  Quentin Tarantino

Notes:  Tarantino is the most consistently compelling director working today.  His films are must-sees by any cinephile.  But Bigelow will be rewarded for making the first Iraq War movie whose total box office exceeded the sticker price of a Buick.

Best Actress

Probable winner:  Sandra Bullock

Should win:  Sandra Bullock

Notes:  If Bullock doesn’t win, the entire Bible Belt will unfasten itself and horsewhip Hollywood.  It might be worth it just to see Ari Emanuel try to hug it out with Baltimore Ravens tackle Michael Oher.

Best Actor

Probable winner:  Jeff Bridges

Should win:  Jeff Bridges

Notes:  Long overdue.  One word (plus a definite article):  “The Dude.”

Best Supporting Actress

Probable winner:  Mo’Nique

Should win:  See above

Notes:  Having a name punctuated like the Na’vi doesn’t hurt.

Best Supporting Actor

Probable winner:  Christoph Waltz

Should win:  See above

Notes:  Christopher Plummer is a sentimental dark-horse candidate.  Can you believe it’s Plummer’s first-ever nomination?  Unfortunately for him, the winner will have one less syllable in his first name.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Probable winner:  Up in the Air

Should win:  In the Loop

Notes:  In the Loop is the best comedy of 2009, a political (and really NSFW) movie that even a right-winger could love.  It deserves its very own post on BH.  Maybe I’ll do one later, if the clamor is loud enough.

Best Original Screenplay

Probable winner:  toss-up between The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds (probably Hurt Locker; I just can’t bring myself to acknowledge that)

Should win:  toss-up between Inglourious Basterds and Up

Notes:  Many moons ago, I was the first person (other than Quentin) to clap eyes on Tarantino’s script for Pulp Fiction.  He wouldn’t let me read it, but I saw the storied stack of paper on his coffee table.  Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you the whole story.

Best Animated Feature

Probable winner:  Up

Should win:  See above

Notes:  I haven’t seen The Book of Kells, which hasn’t been released in the U.S. yet.  It looks amazing, however.

Best Cinematography

Probable winner:  The Hurt Locker

Should win:  Inglourious Basterds

Notes:  Are we sick of the faux-documentary style yet?

Best Editing

Probable winner:  The Hurt Locker

Should win:  District 9

Notes:  I’d pick Inglourious Basterds here, but it should have been shortened by about 15 minutes (like virtually every Tarantino film since Pulp Fiction).

Best Art Direction

Probable winner:  Avatar

Should win:  Avatar

Notes:  Some would say the eye candy was the only good thing about Avatar.  Some would be right.

Best Original Score

Probable winner:  Up

Should win:  Up

Notes:  Up’s composer, Michael Giacchino, also scores Lost.  That’s enough  for him to win my vote, right there.  (Even though the temple thing is really bugging me this season — but that isn’t his fault.)

Best Foreign Language Film

Probable winner:  The White Ribbon

Should win:  I don’t know, didn’t see enough of them to say.  (Whew, that felt good to get off my chest!)

Notes:  The White Ribbon is in black and white.  It should be a lock.

Best Documentary Feature

Probable winner:  Since I’ve got a documentary coming out this year, I’m going to steer well clear of this one.  (Psst, The Cove will win.)

For those of you wagering on the outcomes, here are my predictions for the rest of the categories.  Just so you know which ones to avoid.

Costumes: The Young Victoria

Makeup:  Star Trek

Visual Effects:  Avatar

Sound Mixing:  Avatar

Sound Editing:  The Hurt Locker

Song:  The Weary Kind (Crazy Heart)

Animated Short:  A Matter of Loaf and Death

Documentary Short:  The Last Truck:  Closing of a GM Plant

Live Action Short:  The Door

So, who do you think will win?

Plaintiff, Master Sgt. Jeffrey S. Sarver, is, in fact, the film’s main character “Will James” or “Blaster One” [which was Master Sgt. Sarver's "call signal" during his tours of duty in Iraq]. 

Screenwriter Mark Boal with Director Katherine Bigelow

The suit alleges that the screenwriter of “The Hurt Locker,” Mark Boal, was allowed, as part of an armed services press program, to be embedded in Master Sgt. Sarver’s unit. Virtually all of the situations portrayed in the film were, in fact, occurrences involving Master Sgt. Sarver that were observed and documented by Screenwriter Boal.  Master Sgt. Sarver also coined the phrase, “The Hurt Locker” for Boal.

Ultimately, a magazine article about Master Sgt. Sarver, written by Screenwriter Boal, appeared in Playboy Magazine. That story was later adapted by Boal for the screenplay of “The Hurt Locker.” The suit alleges that the film’s makers falsely claim that the characters portrayed in the film are fictional when, in fact, the film’s main character “Will James,” IS Master Sgt. Sarver.

The suit alleges that the movie’s screenwriter and makers decided to cheat Master Sgt. Sarver [a man who has repeatedly risked his life for his country] out of financial participation in the film, and any acknowledgment of his heroic actions in Iraq.  Master Sgt. Sarver only learned of the Appropriation of his identity after the film’s release.

Full press release can be read here.

The Los Angeles Times:

At one point, “The Hurt Locker” might have been made with government cooperation. But just 12 hours before Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale was to fly to Jordan to serve as the Army’s technical advisor to “The Hurt Locker,” he said in an interview that he heard there might be problems. A Jordanian official told him that scenes were being shot that were not in the script that the Army had approved. Breasseale accused the producer of shooting a scene in which soldiers act violently toward detainees. (The military does not provide help to films depicting violations of the laws of war, unless their consequences are shown.) He also charged that the production had driven a Humvee into a Palestinian refugee camp in order to film angry crowd scenes.

This might refer to a scene where what are supposed to be Iraqi kids are seen angrily throwing rocks at an American Humvee. A scene that seems to say we don’t want you here.

“Nice working with you,” Breasseale said he recalled telling a producer before the military decided to stop working with the production. “Kathryn has a lot of talent, but I cannot trust that your company will honor its contract to the soldiers and government of the U.S.” Breasseale said the filmmakers had been solicitous of the Army’s opinion, “trying to get the look and feel right,” and they had been allowed to film at an Army logistics base in Kuwait.  …

[Screenwriter and producer Mark] Boal said that while the production initially worked with the U.S. military, it parted ways when it became clear they would not approve of “The Hurt Locker’s” script. He said the producers did not film on a base in Kuwait and never signed a contract.

Both screenwriter/producer Mark Boal, and military technical advisor Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale agree that at one time the U.S. Military was working with the “Hurt Locker” producers. Then, according to Breasseale, “scenes were being shot that were not in the script that the Army had approved” and that he could no longer “trust that ["The Hurt Locker"] company [would] honor its contract to the soldiers and government of the U.S.”

Boal’s response is that no contract was signed, but that’s taking the word “contract” literally. Even my inital reading of Breasseale’s comments weren’t that literal. My first assumption was that he meant an unwritten contract, and if scenes were added after the military had already approved the script  – scenes of our guys committing detainee abuse — Breasseale is absolutely correct.