Word: baer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...purpose. After winning an Oscar for Traffic in 2001, Gaghan turned down seven-figure offers to write the fourth Indiana Jones movie and adapt The Da Vinci Code. Instead, inspired by an anecdote about an oil lobbyist in See No Evil, a memoir by former CIA officer Robert Baer, Gaghan decided to make a complex, journalistic movie about the politics of crude. "It's rare in Hollywood to get the chance to work on something that you actually care about," says Gaghan. "The tragedy of the place is all these talented people trying to get excited about stuff they themselves...
...with Warner Bros., even though details about the movie were nonexistent. "In those situations," says Soderbergh, "you never expect the studio to see the UFO, but you've got to make them believe you saw it." Still, Gaghan needed a story, and See No Evil was no help. Even Baer admits that much of the book is so esoteric that it's "wasted on everyone but Israeli intelligence...
...Gaghan did what everyone in Hollywood does--lunch. Sitting across from Baer for the first time, at a Santa Monica restaurant called Pedals ("A little fey for a high-level spook meeting," says Gaghan) in 2002, he sensed that the ex-spy, who was once accused of trying to arrange the assassination of Saddam Hussein, was far better movie material than his book. As it happened, Baer, who speaks Farsi and Arabic, was a willing conduit into the culture and characters of the Middle East. "Summer was ending, and I had to take my daughter back to boarding school...
...Gaghan, Baer and Baer's then 13-year-old daughter Charlotte met up in Nice. Within a few hours, they were relaxing on the yacht of a former Fatah intelligence officer. Then a representative of the Carlyle Group, the global investment behemoth, anchored next to them. "It kept getting crazier and crazier," says Baer. "You could see Gaghan beginning to frame a picture." Part of the insanity was the disconnect between Baer and his old associates. "I'm an ex-bureaucrat," says Baer. "I have no money. I got a $70,000 advance for my book--which in their world...
Oddly enough, Baer is the most shaded character in the film, in his way prefiguring a more modern ambiguity. But the film is most significantly about puzzled people trying to comprehend the cosmic reversal of fortune that was the Depression. They don't have much more than raw courage and simple virtues to rely on. Unlike most period pieces, Cinderella Man encourages us to fondly recall not songs or clothes but values we have largely mislaid. Look on the faces of the elder Braddocks when they realize they don't have enough fried bologna to feed their kids...