Word: traffics
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Very few screenwriters get kidnapped. In Hollywood, where most of them live and work, they're considered low-value targets. But moments after arriving in Beirut in 2002, Stephen Gaghan, the Oscar-winning writer of Traffic, found himself in what seemed to be a hostage situation. His cell phone rang, and the voice on the other end said, "I've got something really special you can do, but you have to do it right now and I can't tell you what it is." Gaghan walked out of the airport and got into a car with a stranger. As they...
...interest in movies and had decided to grant the screenwriter an audience--even though Gaghan hadn't requested one. Naturally, the near kidnapping found its way into Gaghan's new film Syriana, which dramatizes the politics of oil, terrorism and the Persian Gulf in much the same way Traffic spun entertainment out of addiction, drug policy and the U.S.-Mexico border. If anything, Syriana, which opens Nov. 23, is more ambitious and demanding than its predecessor. The movie has multiple narratives that are deliberately confusing. It casts an actor known for his likability, Matt Damon, as an oil trader profiting...
...became perhaps the only writer in history to be rejected by both Baywatch Nights and Red Shoe Diaries before landing a job on NYPD Blue under celebrated writer guru David Milch. But struggling for years imbued him with an uncommon sense of 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...
Steven Soderbergh, who directed Traffic and whose production company, Section Eight, bought the rights to See No Evil, negotiated the deal 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...
...terrorism are like the people in a school or post office who are pressured, feeling there is no alternative" and "You can go to www .fadlallah org. Gaghan knew by then that an Arabist ex-- CIA agent would be a major character in the aborning film. But as in Traffic, he wanted multiple points of view, so he logged more miles--he guesses his expenses approached $70,000--and did similarly intensive research stints with oil traders in London and lawyers in Washington. Through a journalist friend, he arranged a meeting with Perle a few months before the invasion...