"Crash" director switches from 9/11 project to Iraq drama

[villager]

Warners arm walks through 'Garden'
Haggis to direct Jones, Theron in drama

By MICHAEL FLEMING



Paul Haggis -- who'd been expected to follow "Crash" with an adaptation of Richard Clarke's 9/11 expose "Against All Enemies" -- is changing course. He's in talks to next direct Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron in "The Garden of Elah," eyeing a late-year start date for the drama.

Warner Independent Pictures will distribute domestically, because WB owns the underlying material from which Haggis wrote the script. Cast and financing are being finalized. The coin is being assembled by Patrick Wachsberger's Summit Entertainment and Steve Samuels Media Capital, the latter of which financed "Michael Clayton" and "Running With Scissors."

Jones will play a career soldier whose son mysteriously goes AWOL, shortly after returning to the U.S. from the front lines in Iraq. Theron will play a local police detective who helps him get to the bottom of the soldier's disappearance. Haggis has been scouting locations around Albuquerque and in Texas.

Genesis of the project was "Death and Dishonor," a Playboy magazine article written by Mark Boal that WB bought last year for Haggis and his producing partner Larry Becsey. Pic's a fictionalized version of a true story, in which retired Army vet named Lanny Davis uncovered that his son had been murdered during a night of carousing. He'd been attacked by members of his own platoon who were still hopped up from a ferociously violent battlefield tour in Baghdad.

www.variety.com

[CJCRANE]

1. "Path to 9/11" beat them to it

(dramatizing the run-up to 9/11, that is)

[villager]

2. in a sense -- I assume Haggis' version would've been accurate, though

n/t

[GreenPartyVoter]

3. ONe could still touch on 9/11 in an Iraq drama; play up the fact that Iraq

was based on a lie.. and here, see the carnage that's been wrought.

[villager]

4. I wonder when Hollywood will make *that* movie?

n/t