Plame's Spy Novel Coming From Penguin in 2012

We heard last year that notoriously outed CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was working on a spy novel with mystery writer Sarah Lovett.  Today Deadline reveals that the publisher will be new Penguin imprint Blue Rider Press, and that the book will be out in 2012.  Plame previously penned a non-fiction memoir. She was also the subject of a Decemberists song, of Bourne Identity director Doug Liman's excellent 2010 spy movie Fair Game (review here), and served as a techinical advisor on the first season Liman's CIA-set TV series Covert Affairs (review here).  Covert Affairs: Season One is out today on DVD from Universal.

Special Features Revealed For Covert Affairs DVD

We already heard that USA's excellent freshman spy series Covert Affairs is coming to DVD on May 17th from Universal.  Now DVD Active has the list of special features. "Extras will include feature commentaries on 3 episodes featuring stars Piper Perabo and Christopher Gorham; executive producers Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) and David Bartis; and show creators Matt Corman and Chris Ord, deleted scenes, a gag reel, an exclusive tour of the Covert Affairs set, featurettes ("Welcome to The Farm", "Blind Insight"), and a descriptive narration of the visual elements of the series for visually impaired viewers." Sadly no commentary with technical advisor Valerie Plame Wilson or featurettes on the real CIA as a workplace like I'd hoped for, but still a good assortment of extras! I'm glad, as I loved this series.

Read my review of the Covert Affairs pilot here.

Upcoming Spy DVDs: Covert Affairs

TV Shows On DVD reports that USA's summer hit Covert Affairs (which made my own list of the best new spy TV shows of 2010) will hit DVD on May 17.  Covert Affairs stars Piper Perabo as freshman CIA officer Annie Walker. While there are some of the soap opera elements that have haunted the genre since Alias, it's mainly a spy show as workplace dramady.  I've always been a fan of the "desk" side of the spy drama, and I think Covert Affairs handles the office politics better than any other US spy series I can think of.  Certainly better than the histrionics of CTU!  Of course, this is still a USA show, which means it's also got its share of in-the-field excitement as well.  It's a solid, fairly believable character-driven espionage series. 

No extras have been announced for this release, but I hope that changes.  With a show like this that goes out of its way more than most to depict a fairly realistic CIA, I'd love to see some featurettes about that attention to detail and attempts at realism.  I'd also like to see an interview or hear a commentary with the show's technical advisor (and obvious inspiration for Kari Matchett's character), Valerie Plame-Wilson, who has already recorded a commentary track for the DVD release of Doug Liman's movie about her, Fair Game (review here). Liman also produces Covert Affairs.

Covert Affairs: Season 1, a 3-disc set, will retail for $59.98, but obviously it will be findable cheaper than that.  This artwork is a mock-up, subject (and likely) to change. 

Read my review of the Covert Affairs pilot here.

Upcoming Spy DVDs: Fair Game (2010)

DVD Active reports that Summit Entertainment will release Bourne Identity director Doug Liman's latest spy movie, Fair Game, on DVD and Blu-ray on March 29. Liman finds the Le Carré-esque spy story at the heart of the infamous Valerie Plame affair, and makes the most of it, bringing the same "in the moment" sort of hand-held, real-time camera work that captured the action in Bourne to the conference rooms of CIA headquarters in Langley–and making intense debates just as exciting as a car chase! (Read my full review here.) The only extra seems to be a commentary with the real Valerie Plame Wilson (played marvelously by Naomi Watts in the film) and Joe Wilson (played by Sean Penn), which is a bit disappointing.  I would have like to hear from Liman. Still, Fair Game is a fantastic spy movie (among my favorites of the year), and well worth checking out at home if you missed its limited theatrical run. Retail is $22.99 for the DVD and $30.49 for the Blu-ray, but both will inevitably be available online and in stores for less than that.

Movie Review: Fair Game (2010)

Movie Review: Fair Game (2010)

It’s interesting that both Bourne directors decided to make movies about the search for Iraqi WMD that was going on at about the time that the first Bourne movie hit theaters–and that both, though featuring very different approaches to the subject matter–turned out to be excellent spy movies. Whereas Paul Greengrass’s Green Zone (reviewed here) focused on thrilling, Bourne-like action, Doug Liman delivers an equally thrilling entry in the more realistic, serious side of the spy genre sometimes referred to as the “Desk Spy” sub-genre. (In this case, that moniker is a bit of a misnomer, though, as the protagonist does indeed go into the field. But the film’s most exciting moments are those in Langley conference rooms.) And refreshingly, in stark contrast to the Bourne series, neither of these films vilify the CIA!

Fair Game (not to be confused with the 1995 Cindy Crawford vehicle!) tells the story of a woman who, against her wishes, became the most famous American spy of the last decade: Valerie Plame Wilson. The story became a hot-button political issue sparking fierce debate on both sides of the aisles, but at its core it always seemed to me a classic spy yarn that could be torn straight out of Le Carré: a covert operative running dangerous missions in the field is exposed and hung out to dry by her bureaucratic masters for political reasons. That’s a log-line that with little tweaking could easily be applied to at least three Le Carré books (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Looking Glass War and The Honourable Schoolboy) and probably more. It’s the stuff of classic spy stories! And that’s exactly the approach that Liman takes to this material: he tells the spy story. In doing so (as with the best spy fiction), he tells many other stories too, and a film that begins as a flat-out spy movie very naturally morphs into a political thriller and a family drama by its denouement. In a genre landscape rife with popcorn explorations of spy marriages (Undercovers, True Lies and particularly Liman’s own Mr. and Mrs. Smith), it’s very interesting to see a fact-based tale of a marriage rocked by one spouse’s secret life. In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Liman used conventions of the spy genre to humorously explore relationship issues. In Fair Game, he achieves a blistering combination of spy movie and family drama. The former had a gunfight at the kitchen table; the latter has a disagreement that leads to raised voices in the same setting... and the stakes feel much higher in the latter.

Naomi Watts is excellent as Plame, as is Sean Penn as her former ambassador husband, Joe Wilson. Even before Valerie’s exposure, her career inflicts constant trauma on their marriage. Valerie’s ceaseless business trips to Kuala Lumpur or Amman, Jordan take their toll on her home life. Her young children ask when their mom will be back, and their father can’t give them an answer. Even he doesn’t know where she is or how long she’ll be gone, though he is one of the few people who knows her true profession.

Besides the intense portrait of a possibly decaying marriage, Fair Game shines as a spy thriller. The movie opens with Valerie undercover in Kuala Lumpur. These scenes may be familiar ones, but that familiarity is essential to establishing the genre before shaking up its formula. That genre familiarity is aided immeasurably by an excellent score by John Powell of the percussion-heavy, pounding variety with which he has redefined the sound of the spy movie in the last decade. It occurred to me watching this film that Powell is really the first person to do that since John Barry defined it to begin with in the Sixties. Both composers have worked within a wide spectrum of sub-genres, from outlandish fantasy (You Only Live Twice in Barry’s case; Knight and Day for Powell) to grounded, serious action (From Russia With Love; the Bourne films) to gritty drama full of bureaucratic hurdles (The Ipcress File; Fair Game), applying their signature motifs across the board. While many great composers have worked in the spy genre over the last several decades (and some have experimented with totally different sorts of scores), no one has so exhaustively overhauled the sound of spy movies as Powell. Barry’s jazz-infused style remained the expected and accepted soundtrack of the genre up until the 2000s (when it may have been partially done in by Austin Powers). Now it’s propulsive percussion–which offers somewhat less room for variation, but perfectly compliments the high-energy spy movies being made today–and Powell brings that in spades to Fair Game, signaling spy to the audience as loudly as Barry-like trumpet flourishes did in the past. Granted, the visuals and the settings do that as well, but in the case of real-life subject matter that could have been handled a number of different ways, it’s important to establish the territory as early as possible.

The scenes of Valerie recruiting assets overseas and eventually sending them into harm’s way deliver exactly what fans of the serious spy genre want, but as with many of the best examples of that side of the genre, the scenes back in the office are even more rewarding. Liman operates the camera himself, and brings the same handheld craziness for which the Bourne movies are famous not to running-through-Baghdad action scenes, but to meetings in Langley conference rooms! The constantly shifting, cinema verite-style camera work combined with naturalistic lighting really makes you feel like you’re there–and it’s harrowing! Fans of the Le Carré school of spy novels know how harrowing and suspenseful a good author can make the bureaucratic side of spying, but I’ve never seen the day-to-day business of CIA officers conveyed with such a sense of urgency on film before. You really get the sense that this is important work, and that lives and indeed the very fate of the nation depend on decisions made within these cramped walls. If the Bourne movies (particularly Greengrass’s–for better or for worse) redefined the way that action is portrayed in spy movies, Fair Game redefines the way intrigue is portrayed. If there’s ever a movie version of The Sandbaggers, it should be filmed like this.

Despite accusations from people who probably didn’t see the film, Paul Greengrass’s Green Zone managed to explore the WMD issue without becoming a political film. I can’t say the same for Doug Liman’s Fair Game, although despite the presence of outspoken activist Sean Penn (whose own extra-textual persona unfortunately distracts from what’s really a very wonderful performance during a patriotic speech at the movie’s finale), the director approaches what became a hotly politicized story about as apolitically as could be possible. Liman doesn’t engage in any of the games of speculation so popular among media pundits on both sides about how high up in the administration the decision to expose an undercover CIA operative went. Instead he sticks to the non-controversial official version of the facts, laying the blame squarely on the shoulders of the only person convicted of a crime in the matter, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and self-confessed State Department source Richard Armitage.

Libby is the only key figure in the Administration portrayed with any substantial screen time by an actor. The only time we ever see the President or the Vice President, it’s done using actual TV footage from the time–not cut into the movie directly, but playing on televisions in the scenes. It’s a tricky approach that could have gone wrong, but it works. Having lived through this little bit of history so recently, I also found it neat to see Liman’s interpretation of what went on behind the scenes of those well-known soundbites. He gives the feeling of filling in the blanks, which works well. In a bold move, he solidifies that approach by ending with footage of the real Valerie Plame testifying before Congress instead of Watts. It’s a jarring move, but Liman pulls it off and it serves as a good reminder that this sort of intrigue really happens, and isn't just the realm of Le Carré and his ilk.

Fair Game is an excellent movie that doesn’t dwell on the political debate fueled by the events depicted, but instead delivers an incredibly satisfying spy story and family drama. The lead actors turn in excellent performances that should be recognized come awards season, but ultimately what this movie will be remembered for in the annals of spy film history is the way Doug Liman (aided by John Powell) brazenly redefines the backroom intrigue of the Serious side of the genre. Fair Game is to Serious spy movies what the Bourne films proved to be to Action ones.

Valerie Plame Wilson Writing A Spy Novel

The AP reports that Valerie Plame Wilson (who previously penned the memoir Fair Game) is following in the footsteps of other famous spies-turned-novelists like Stella Rimington, John Le Carré and Graham Greene.  The outed CIA covert operative is collaborating on a spy novel with mystery writer Sarah Lovett (Dark Alchemy).  "I was always irked by how pop culture portrayed female CIA operatives," she tells the AP. "I wanted to write a thriller that was more realistic." Plame Wilson singles out Alias in particular as lacking realism.  (What?!  You mean real spies aren't always related to or in love with one another? While piecing together ancient doomsday devices?  I'm shocked!)  She did apparently look up to Jennifer Garner in one respect though. "I used to look at Alias," she says, "[a]nd I'd say to myself, 'I wish I had that body!'" Well, now she kind of does: Plame Wilson is played by the gorgeous Naomi Watts in Doug Liman's new movie based on her book, Fair Game ("It could be worse," she jokes) and another stunning blonde, Kari Machett, plays a character seemingly inspired by her on USA's Covert Affairs.  Plame Wilson serves as a technical advisor on Covert Affairs, which is produced by Liman.  Fair Game, which I've been very excited to see ever since The Hollywood Reporter reviewed it at Cannes audaciously declared that it "might be one of the best spy movies ever," opens tomorrow. See the trailer here.

Trailer For Doug Liman's New Spy Movie, Fair Game

Yahoo has the trailer for Fair Game, the film The Hollywood Reporter said "might be one of the best spy movies ever." And so does YouTube!  The trailer seems to confirm that while clearly in a different league from his earlier spy films, The Bourne Identity and Mr. and Mrs. Smith,  Doug Liman's latest is clearly a spy film, and not mired in political diatribe as some had feared.  To me, Valerie Plame's story (an intelligence operative exposed and hung out to dry at the whims of politicians in her own government) sounds like it could be ripped out of a Le Carré novel.  It may have gotten lost in the ensuing blather of political pundits on both sides, but at its heart this is a great spy story, and it looks like that is the aspect that Liman has chosen to play up.  Judge for yourself:

The Spy Story As Workplace Dramady
TV Review: Covert Affairs

Judging from the pilot, USA has another winning spy series in their line-up–a worthy stable mate for Burn Notice. I really enjoyed the first episode of Covert Affairs. There’s a lot of Alias in it–and a dash of Sex and the City for the ladies, in the form of name-dropping high end fashion and shoe brands–but Covert Affairs’ unique contribution to the genre is that it begins at the beginning, on rookie agent Annie Walker’s (The Prestige's Piper Perabo) first day on the job. We get a brief taste of her training on the CIA’s famous “farm,” but then she’s pulled out early for mysterious reasons and put straight on the job. This way, the audience is introduced to the CIA the same way as Annie. She’s got first day jitters, and messes up matters of basic routine, like trying (and failing) to pass through the turnstyles before she’s gotten her access badge. She meets an intimidating new boss, engages in exploratory flirtations with co-workers, tries to find her (Louboutin-clad) footing in an unfamiliar and intimidating environment–all the trials and tribulations of starting a new job that any viewer can relate to, only moreso, because she’s working at the CIA!

I’ve always responded to the “workplace drama” (or, in this case, “dramady”) side of the spy genre. Many of my favorite genre entries focus as much on office politics and the hurdles of petty bureaucracy as they do on the formalities of espionage: The Sandbaggers, Queen and Country and the entire oeuvre of John Le Carré, to name but a few. I think the secret of Le Carré’s popularity, in fact, is that he hit upon a unique way to make workplace drama and office politics exciting. Everyone in the world can relate to the machinations of nefarious co-workers, but they’d be boring to read about if the stakes weren’t as high as the very fate of the nation. Covert Affairs is much, much lighter fare than Le Carré, but taps into that same vein of spy story as workplace dramady.

The stellar production design by Production Designer Franco De Cotiis, Art Director Aleks Marinkovich and Set Decorator Zeljka Alosinac further reinforce the notion of Covert Affairs as foremost a workplace series. I loved their CIA sets, which manage to seem very “workplace-y” as well as spy-ish with the requisite futurism, but not too much of it. This steel cubicle-filled CIA interior looks like a place where people would actually work, with just a hint of Ken Adamish spy vibe lurking in the details.

Even the requisite office entanglements of a workplace dramadey that can easily go so wrong (see: 24) are handled well in the pilot. I was amused and engrossed by the rocky and competitive relationship between two married CIA officers and rival department heads, Joan (Kari Matchett) and Arthur (the great Peter Gallagher) Campbell. She’s convinced that he’s cheating on her and uses Agency resources in an attempt to prove it, but the talented actors play that in a believable and humorous way, so it doesn’t stretch credulity the way that everybody sleeping with everybody else does at CTU. In fact, the writing is quite clever when Arthur calls Joan on her dubious tactics:

“You’re using valuable Agency resources to track me.”

“That’s not a denial.”

“Why can’t you be a good CIA wife and just trust me?”

“Because I’m not a CIA wife. I’m a wife who works for the CIA.”

Of course, there’s still leeway for everyone to sleep with everyone else in future episodes, but based on the pilot I have faith in the writers and actors to handle it well. The groundwork for a young, attractive, oversexed CIA is carefully laid out here when Annie’s Dixon (which is to say the man on the other end of the radio when she’s on missions), Auggie (Christopher Gorham), informs her that the CIA was on a hiring freeze before 9/11, so now half the employees have under five years' experience (or something like that). Furthermore, the Agency encourages dating within for security reasons. How convenient! But it rings true. In fact, many details about this CIA ring fairly true, by television standards. This may be because one of the Agency’s most famous former employees, Valarie Plame-Wilson (to whom Matchett actually bares a more than passing resemblance), serves as the technical advisor, no doubt through her connection to executive producer Doug Liman, who made a movie about her life. (I’m frankly surprised that the network’s publicity didn’t play up this angle more.) Of course, no espionage television series is ever going to do much more than pay lip service to the reality of the job before moving onto the sort of shoot-em-up hijinks that we’re all clamoring to see. I now present said lip service verbatim, which comes after Annie has been fired upon by a sniper while on her very first assignment.

Joan: You know, some operatives go an entire career without seeing a bullet fired.

Annie: Is that supposed to make me feel better?

Joan: It’s supposed to make you realize this is unusual.

We’ll see just how unusual such occurrences prove to be in subsequent episodes, but I’m guessing they happen at least weekly. And I wouldn’t have it any other way, of course. After all, I do want escapist action from my spy TV as well as relatable office intrigue!

When it comes, that action is generally well-handled. The scene in which the sniper shoots up a hotel room–with Annie in it–is visceral enough to belie the show’s Bourne pedigree (again through Liman), and a car chase is excitingly shot as well. (During it, however, Annie mutters things to herself like, “D.E.C. Method: Determine, Evade, Counterpursuit,” which kind of made me long for Michael Westen’s voiceovers instead–a much better delivery mechanism for such tradecraft secrets.) A skydiving sequence amidst which the opening titles unfold is particularly breathtaking, with aerial footage as good as any I’ve ever seen on TV.

Covert Affairs certainly isn’t without cliches, but it gets most of them out of the way right up front, intercut within a lie detector test framing device that (quite cleverly, actually) tells us all the backstory we need to know about Annie. We see a three-week romance with a mystery man who’s bound to play a big role down the line (in fact, we glimpse him again later, in a very different context), and it unfolds in nothing but cliches: running on a beach, candle-lit sex, a parting note explaining little. Auggie is blind and that’s every bit as precious as you fear it will be, but the story behind his blindness isn’t bad (he already worked for the CIA when he was blinded by an IED in Iraq) and Gorham sells it well enough (even all those tired Daredevil tropes like identifying a woman by her perfume) that by the end of the episode it just seems natural. The producers carefully avoid my least favorite spy show cliche, typified in Alias with everyone important working out of “the CIA’s Los Angeles branch.” No, Annie’s CIA is actually in Langley, and the show is set in and around Washington DC (or at least Toronto’s decent approximation thereof, mixed in with some establishing shots of key landmarks) rather than asking us to believe that the real epicenter of America’s intelligence community is LA or, in the case of USA’s other spy hit, Miami. However, they still contrive a way for Annie to undertake assignments right here in the US of A, despite the CIA’s mission statement to the contrary: she works for a made-up section called the “Domestic Protection Division” which operates on American soil and is so top secret we’re not meant to have heard of it. Oh well. For the sake of the show, I’ll buy it. And I don’t think we’ve had a regularly Washington-set spy series since Scarecrow and Mrs. King (excepting, perhaps, the extremely short-lived 1991 series Under Cover), so it’s still pretty original.

Perhaps owing to the current incarnation of 007 himself, the same trendsetter who made gadgets ubiquitous in all spy series for decades, there are no gadgets present in Covert Affairs’ pilot (and no Q or Marshall character), but Annie’s blessed with Jason Bourne’s talent for improvising, and using everyday objects to her advantage. She uses her compact against the sniper, and it’s not the kind of compact that doubles as a transmitter or anything. She also uses a Listerine breath strip to trick a thumbprint reader, and then sticks it in her mouth, which struck me as being more gross than cool. (You know how many people must stick their germy thumbs on that thing every day? Never mind that this particular facility was a morgue!) And she even manages to find a spy use for those Louboutin platforms that are so frequently mentioned by name and focused on. (This show has all the product placement we expect of our spy entertainment: Starbucks, Opentable.com, BMW and all those brand name fashions and fragrances.) Yes, Annie’s a pretty capable gal, and she even finds a use for her language skills that were ostensibly the reason she was pulled out of training and activated early. I do wish that the linguistic “clue” she picks up on that advances the spy plot in the 3rd Act had been more clever, though. The one they use smacks of the sort of lazy writing you might be able to get away with in the middle of the second season, but not in your pilot! I’ll give it a pass, though, since it was embedded amidst so much commendable material.

Also commendable is the topical plot device of Russians carrying out assassinations of their own on foreign soil, Litvinenko-style (although like most modern spy shows, they seem to mix up the Russian intelligence services FSB and the SVD). I like that, and the pilot gives every indication that we’ll continue to see topical, ripped-from-the-headlines sorts of spy plots rather than shadowy cabals in pursuit of mystical artifacts, further differentiating this series from Alias.

As is no doubt evident, I was fully hooked from the pilot for Covert Affairs. It’s a light spy dramady that manages to separate itself from its obvious influences by the means of a fairly unique premise focusing on the CIA as a workplace. It’s a story about a somewhat naive, but capable when it counts (not to mention fashion-savvy) young woman navigating the difficult waters of a new job, and that job just happens to entail posing as a prostitute and getting shot at. And it takes its spying pretty seriously for the most part, which isn’t really that common in the light and fluffy school of espionage television. Covert Affairs is a welcome addition to an ever-growing current roster of spy shows on the verge of equaling the genre’s Sixties preponderance. USA is sure to re-run the pilot throughout the weekend, so set your DVR and give it a try if you haven’t already.

Tradecraft: Summit Picks Up Valerie Plame Movie

Variety reports that Summit Entertainment, the fledgling studio best known for the Twilight saga (and a number of Pierce Brosnan movies), has picked up the North American distribution rights for Bourne Identity director Doug Liman's latest spy movie Fair Game, about outed CIA agent Valerie Plame. Naomi Watts stars as Plame, and Sean Penn plays her husband. Plame's is a real-life story of the messy intersection between spies and politics that could easily have come from the mind of John Le Carré... and I find it fascinating.  In 2003, the undercover agent's identity was leaked to the media and made public–putting her in jeopardy–by shadowy figures in her own government to forward their own political agenda after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, publicly criticized the administration's justification for war in Iraq.  The issue was instantly politicized, but to me the most interesting aspect of it is not the political ramifications at all, but the inherent espionage drama.  I mean, this is exactly the story that spy fans have read in fictional form again and again from Le Carré to Queen & Country: an active agent risking her life for her country betrayed and hung out to dry by unscrupulous politicians. And Liman seems like the right man to tell it, having kickstarted the cinematic adventures of another agent foresaken by those he served, Jason Bourne.  Unsurprisingly, Summit's co-chairs described their new acquisition as "a very strong, engaging thriller that will keep audiences on the edge of their seats." According to the trade, "Fair Game is based on Plame's memoir of the same name [not the 1995 Cindy Crawford movie], and also draws from Wilson's book The Politics of Truth."  Brothers Jez and John Butterworth wrote the script. 

When it was first announced, Liman's movie was set up at Warner Bros., but the studio got cold feet after other serious, adult dramas (like State of Play and Duplicity) flopped at the box office. Summit might be just the right company to buck that trend, though, having already successfully marketed serious dramas like Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker and The Ghost Writer.  They'll get a free head-start on their marketing campaign, as Fair Game is the only American movie in competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

Tradecraft: Plame And Salt

Watts and Penn Play the Plame Game

Doug Liman has switched Antipodean actresses in his Valerie Plame movie: According to Variety, Naomi Watts and not Nicole Kidman (as previously reported) will be starring as outed CIA agent Valerie Plame in The Bourne Identity director's movie based on her story, Fair Game. (Wasn't that the title of a disposable Cindy Crawford action movie in the 90s?)Furthermore, newly-anointed Best Actor Sean Penn is in talks to come aboard as Plame's husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson. The trade reminds us: "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."

Penn is an excellent actor (who completely disappeared into the character of Harvey Milk in a wonderful performance... even though I was rooting for Mickey Rourke), but he is so instantly associated with his very public political stances that his casting instantly politicizes the film, which I think is too bad. By its very nature, the story instantly became a divisive political one, when at its heart its the stuff of classic spy fiction: an agent in the field is betrayed and compromised by her masters for reasons of petty bureaucracy that have nothing to do with her directly. John Le Carré could have made it up. But it's real, and it's a fascinating tale of a wronged spook, and I hope that Penn's casting doesn't alienate a potential segment of the audience for what should be a top-notch real-life spy movie. Then again, as I said to begin with, he's a fantastic actor and an Oscar winner, so hopefully none of that will matter. His presence probably does more good for the film than harm.

Chiwetel Joins Salt

First-rate British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor is the latest to come aboard the Angelina Jolie (formerly Tom Cruise) spy thriller Salt, directed by Patriot Games' and The Quiet American's Phillip Noyce. He will play the Gerard to her Kimble, the Javert to her Jean Valjean. (Or, more appropriately, I suppose, The Operative to her Mal.) Variety puts it less obliquely: "Ejiofor will play Peabody, a young CIA agent who works for Winter (Liev Schreiber), the mentor of Evelyn Salt (Jolie), an agent fingered as a Russian sleeper spy. With Peabody in hot pursuit, she must clear her name and figure out the identity of the real spy." I think I know that identity...

Decemberists To Release "Valerie Plame" Single

Not only is she the subject of a upcoming movies from both Doug Liman and Rod Lurie, but former spook Valerie Plame is also the subject of an upcoming single by indie rock outfit The Decemberists. (I should assert that they're an awesome band and I'm doing them a disservice by calling them an "indie rock outfit," but it just felt right in the newsreel announcer clip of that sentence...) Pitchfork quotes the band's press release describing the song as "an amorous tribute to the onetime CIA operative... written from the point-of-view of one of Plame's inside contacts upon discovering her true identity." The single "Valerie Plame" (Volume 1 of Always the Bridesmaid: A Singles Series in three volumes) will be backed by B-side "O New England" and available exclusively as a digital download and on 7" vinyl October 14. The band will perform it live on Conan O'Brien on November 3 (election eve).

Random Intelligence Dispatches For February 13, 2008

Doug Liman To Direct Valerie Plame Movie?

AICN tips a story on MTV Movies Blog today reporting that Bourne Identity director Doug Liman is prepping a real-life spy movie based on the Valerie Plame affair. I can't really make heads or tails of their actual story (is all that redacting his joke or theirs?), but the gist appears to be that Liman has worked closely with Plame to devise a unique take on her story that won't run afoul of the same CIA censors that chopped up her book. Liman talks a big game: “I have a really, really insane take on how to tell it. It’s so outrageous,” the director gushes. “Ultimately, I’d be doing something no one has ever done before. Therefore it’s automatically appealing to me. I’m just starting to explore whether [what I have in mind] is even possible to do.” Okay... Interesting! I've loved Liman's previous spy movies, and I've always thought that Valerie Plame's story sounded right out of a John Le Carré novel: the agent in the field outed and betrayed because it served the political needs of her masters. It's a story we've heard before, but even more interesting because it really happened... and happened very publicly. Furthermore, Liman's in a good position to tell such a story, having grown up surrounded by the inevitable controversy that occurs whenever espionage and politics mix; his father Arthur Liman served a chief counsel on the Senate's Iran-Contra hearings!

Oh, and he's got Nicole Kidman playing Plame. That's good too. Very good.

Rod Lurie, meanwhile, is developing a rival Plame movie, told not from Plame's point of view like Liman's film, but on that of a Judith Miller-like journalist. Vera Farmiga plays the Plame role in Lurie's Nothing But the Truth.

Jackson Is Still Fury

MTV Movies Blog (why do I keep wanting to type "MTV's Movie Blog?") also has a post today throwing gasoline on the ages-old "Is or isn't Sam Jackson Nick Fury in Iron Man?" fire. At this point, it seems pretty widely assumed that he is (MTV aptly calls the casting "the worst-kept secret in comicdom"), but Jackson himself still won't quite admit it. "I am indeed Nick Fury," he tells MTV, "but I don't know if I'm gonna be in [Iron Man]." Make of that what you will. Possibilities include that he will show up as Fury in this summer's The Incredible Hulk (which has also been rumored, originally to tie the two movies together), that he will play Nick Fury in the long-in-the-works Nick Fury film, or that he will indeed be in Iron Man (and possibly any combination of those other possibilities as well) and is just playing coy. I lean toward the latter...

Tradecraft: Show Runner Joel Surnow Leaves 24

Variety reports that 24's co-creator (with Bob Cochran) and showrunner Joel Surnow is leaving the series when his contract with Fox expires in April. Howard Gordan, who's already been overseeing day-to-day operations for some time, will take over showrunning duties. Surnow was widely considered the mastermind behind the series (although it's clear from the behind-the-scenes features on the DVD sets that it's a collaborative effort) and attracted a lot of attention for his political views, once describing himself as a "right wing nutjob." He also came under fire recently in the media for Jack Bauer's frequent reliance on torture at a time when the issue has been in the spotlight so much in real life. One of Surnow's earlier series (as writer and supervising producer), The Equalizer, was just released on DVD this week. 24 won't return for Season Seven (which has been troubled from the get-go) until January of 2009.

Weird James Bond Casting Rumor

Aintitcool is running a very bizarre rumor today about possible villain casting in Quantum of Solace. If true, then it's potentially a huge spoiler, so proceed with caution. I highly doubt it's true, but stranger things have happened. The rumor pertains to who might be playing the mysterious Blofeld-like mastermind of the villainous organization behind Le Chiffre and the events in Quantum of Solace. We don't even know for sure that we'll meet such a character in this movie, or that it isn't Mathieu Amalric's character, Dominic Green. All we know about the organization is that based on Casino Royale's Mr. White and some of the new villains' names revealed for QoS, its members appear to take codenames based on colors, ala Reservoir Dogs. (Hey, Mr. Blond was in Die Another Day, wasn't he? That was almost as weird as today's casting rumor!) It's a kind of cheesy tactic, but at least different from SPECTRE's numbering system which has been so parodied by Austin Powers and others. My secret hope is that the new organization actually turns out to be SPECTRE, as Daniel Craig hinted at last year. I think EON has sewn up the rights at this point, and they could even use Blofeld again if they wanted to (though that might open the door for more unwelcome lawsuits). I, for one, would love to see a new incarnation of Bond's oldest cinematic enemy!

Random Intelligence Dispatches For July 24, 2007

Tradecraft: Tom Cruise Spies Again...

...with a name downgrade. Who wants to go from "Ethan Hunt" to "Edwin Salt"??? I guess Cruise does, because Variety reports that he is in talks to play the title role in Edwin A. Salt, "a CIA officer who is fingered by a defector as a Russian sleeper spy [and] must elude capture by his superiors" while attempting to prove his innocence and reunite with his family. Kurt Wimmer (writer/director of the very cool Equilibrium) wrote the script, and Hotel Rwanda director Terry George is being courted by Columbia to direct.

Tradecraft: Rod Lurie Takes On Valerie Plame
The Contender writer/director, and creator of the short-lived series Commander In Chief, Rod Lurie, will make another foray into political waters, this time writing and directing a movie based loosely on the Valerie Plame case. Variety describes Nothing But the Truth as "a drama about a D.C.-based female newspaper reporter who outs a CIA agent and is imprisoned for refusing to reveal her source." I think the Plame case reads like a Le Carre story already, and should make a fascinating movie one day. But Lurie's taking a far less interesting approach, to me anyway, by focusing on a Judith Miller-like journalist character instead of taking the point of view of the outed CIA agent. Apparently Warner Bros. has Akiva Goldsman writing that version now, so the two takes on the story may ultimately compete with each other. Kate Beckinsale, Matt Dillon, Edie Falco, Alan Alda and Vera Farmiga (as the agent in question) round out the cast for the Lurie project.

Nick Fury Masterworks

This September Marvel will finally release an archival-quality hardcover edition of the earliest Nick Fury spy comics! Marvel Masterworks: Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Volume 1 includes work by comics legends Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Roy Thomas, Denny O'Neill, Joe Sinnott and of course the man who made Fury Fury, Jim Steranko. At the height of the spy craze in 1965, when Goldfinger and Thunderball ruled the box office and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. ruled TV, Marvel wanted a piece of the espionage action. The solution? To update their WWII character Sgt. Fury to the Bond-Age, making him 20 years older and sporting an eye patch, and, once Steranko got his pencils on him, a cool stealth assault suit. Steranko reprocessed all sorts of cult pop culture, from The Hound of the Baskervilles and King Kong to Will Eisner's The Spirit and the Stan Lee Marvel comics through a fun house mirror of James Bond--both Fleming's and EON's. The results are visually stunning, over-the-top spy adventures dripping with Sixties atmosphere and Pop Art influence. And a classic character who's become one of the most famous fictional spies of all time, the James Bond of comic books. Marvel's hardcover collection, due in September, includes the Fury stories from STRANGE TALES #135-153, TALES OF SUSPENSE #78 and the very first appearance of the "modern day" Nick Fury in FANTASTIC FOUR #21. It'll set you back in the neighborhood of $54.99.

Tradecraft: The Bourne Review
Finally, Variety gives The Bourne Ultimatum an absolutely glowing review. I'm furious at myself for blowing a chance to see this last night, but we'll all catch it soon enough. And from the sound of this review (or what I read of it, anyway, to avoid spoilers), it sounds like we're in for a real treat! I do hope they keep the series going...