Oct 26, 2014

Tradecraft: Paul Greengrass Ponders Some Serious Tunneling

Paul Greengrass is amassing quite a stack of espionage scripts on his development pile. As previously reported, he's already hard at work on an adaptation of the non-fiction spy memoir Agent Storm, and this summer he made the surprise announcement that he was reconsidering his long-held stance on never returning to the franchise that really put him on the map and would (hopefully) re-team with Matt Damon on a new Bourne movie which he would be writing himself. Yesterday Variety reported that the Bourne Ultimatum and Green Zone director has added a Cold War Berlin story to his growing pile. According to the trade, FilmNation Entertainment has acquired the screen rights to a book proposal (that's right; it's not even a book yet, just a proposal!) by journalist Greg Mitchell called The Tunnels. Mark Gordon (The Matador, The Man Who Wouldn't Die) will produce. The Tunnels is purportedly an "untold" true story of a harrowing escape from East Berlin during the days of the Wall about a group of West Germans funded by American news networks on an expedition to get their loved ones out of the East. (The trade doesn't say so, but I'm guessing the plan involves tunnels.) I hope this one happens. Personally, I love Wall-Crossing stories, and we don't get nearly enough of them nowadays.

3 comments:

  1. It's not 'untold' - the story is found in most Berlin Wall histories, but it's certainly movie material.

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  2. I know I've heard it before, too (hence the quotation marks and "purported"), but I wasn't actually able to find it when I spent a few minutes (OK, maybe an hour... I'm procrastinating something else!) flipping through my own resources. The funny thing is how pleased the producers are with themselves for having something "untold" and how impressed Variety is with that! The word is repeated multiple times in the story, and there's even a long quote about how untold it is!

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  3. There was a German TV movie made in 2001 about it, called The Tunnel.

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