Tradecraft: Focus Features Explores 1970s Assassination in A Man Must Die

Deadline reports that Peter Buchman, who scripted the two-part Che for Steven Soderbergh, will return to the subject of late 20th Century South American politics to do a rewrite on Miss Bala director Gerardo Naranjo's A Man Must Die. According to the trade blog, the fact-based thriller centers on "the assassination of Orlando Letelier, a Chilean diplomat in the 1970s who was targeted and killed in Washington D.C. by agents of the Pinochet regime. This story focuses on the FBI investigator who starts to suspect a government conspiracy surrounding the murder." It's a pretty fascinating story involving the Stasi, the CIA and its then-director George H. W. Bush that, weirdly, I had just been reading about the day before seeing this trade article. Good material for a film! Naranjo wrote the previous script draft, and will helm the movie. Perhaps in the wake of Argo's success we'll see more fact-based, Seventies-set spy thrillers.