Tony Scott, the director of, among other things, Top Gun, Days of Thunder, and True Romance, looks set to direct a movie about Pat Dollard, a self-described former “limousine liberal” who switched sides after 9/11, even going so far as to embed himself with troops in Iraq and create a documentary series about Marines. No word what sort of angle the film will take, though it’s based on a recent Vanity Fair profile of Dollard, and Scott’s last couple of films have been heavy on paranoia (the bad guy in last fall’s Deja Vu was a Timothy McVeigh-style right wing terrorist).
Update: Pat Dollard writes in to clarify some details about the project:
The film project is actually not to be based on the Vanity Fair
article. My life rights were optioned and serve as the primary
source material for the film. In fact, as I sat in my initial
meeting with Ton Scott, he asked Evan Wright, author of the Vanity
Fair article, and myself, what either of us thought the storyline of
the film should be. I deferred to Evan, who couldn’t come up with an
answer. Tony was very concerned about this point, and had not yet
decided to make a film about me. He explained that biopics were
extremely difficult, and in the past he’d spent unholy amounts of
money for screenwriters who were never able to deliver shootable
scripts for them. With no preparation, but by simply giving him the
human story that had been left out of Evan’s cheesy sex, drugs and
rock n roll tabloid exercise, Tony was floored. It took me about 4
minutes. ”That’s it!” he exclaimed, “That’s the movie!” He actually
grabbed a tape recorder and asked me to repeat it. He began citing
scenes he imagined from my pitch – the matter was resolved.