Fair Game, the drama about the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, is set to star Naomi Watts and be directed by Doug Liman, best known for his films Swingers, Go, The Bourne Identity and Mr. And Mr.s Smith. William Pohlad’s River Road is financing.
But the big question is whether recent Oscar-winning Milk star Sean Penn will close a deal to play Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Penn is negotiating, but no deal has closed. Pohlad has a strong relationship with Penn: he was a producer on the Terrence Malick-directed Tree of Life, which stars Penn and Brad Pitt and is due out later this year.
Wilson watched his wife’s CIA status become compromised after he wrote op-ed columns that accused the Bush Administration of manipulating intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq.
The project, based on Plame Wilson’s memoir, landed at Pohlad’s River Road after Warner Bros. put the project in turnaround.
Warner Bros. optioned the book and set Jez and John Butterworth (Superbad) to write it at a time when Plame was still vetting the contents of book with the CIA in 2007. Warners decided to let it go and the filmmakers and their CAA reps set it up with Pohlad.
Plame Wilson left the CIA in 2005 and she and her husband filed a civil suit against Vice President Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Cheney’s ex-chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby. While Rove and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage admitted they leaked her agency status to journalists, Libby was convicted of lying to a federal grand jury about his role in compromising her covert status.
Then-President George W. Bush commuted Libby’s 30-month sentence in 2007, but stopped short of granting him a full pardon, despite aggressive lobbying by Cheney before Bush left the White House in January.
Source: Variety
