Paramount Pictures won a bidding war to produce
Kimberly Pierce's next project,
Stop-Loss. Here are details (from subscription-only Variety):
Story follows a soldier who returns home to Texas from Iraq but is then recalled with the "stop-loss" procedure. The pic's protagonist refuses to return to battle.
More over the flip.
Peirce, who has not directed a movie since "Boys Don't Cry" in 1999 but has been linked to many, sparked to the subject when her own brother returned from a year of duty in Fallujah and was quickly called back.
Peirce began preparing a documentary about stop-loss, which has been on the books for decades but wasn't used much until the occupation of Iraq.
After Peirce and Richard worked on "The Ice at the Bottom of the World," they turned the docu into a dramatic script.
CAA shopped it with five minutes of interview footage from vets.
"You're always surprised by that kind of reaction, but the thing that drew us to the project is what appealed to studios," Peirce said. "This is a story about great guys who do the right thing by fighting for this country, and are then done wrong. The fatality rates for second and third tours are very high, and you understand why these guys feel like they've being asked to play another round of Russian roulette."
This purchase follows on the heels of Paramount's acquiring a script about a civilian convoy that is ambushed in Afghanistan, and of course the Oliver Stone 9/11 film, set for release August 11, 2006. For those who haven't heard much about it, it just began shooting in New York, stars
Nicolas Cage and
Michael Pena as Port Authority cops who are trapped underneath the rubble of the World Trade Center, based on a true story. It's actually a decent script, and despite the attachment of Oliver Stone to direct, if they stick to the script, the right wing will have absolutely nothing to complain about. It's a personal story about the struggle of the two cops to remain alive as their families cope with their possible deaths and firefighters try to rescue them. It ignores politics and it celebrates the triumph of the human spirit and faith.