Bigelow at the 82nd Academy Awards in March 2010. (Photo by Pulicciano)Kathryn Bigelow tries to imbue her taut action movies with as much reality as possible, evidenced most recently by the heart-pounding tension experienced by the explosives team featured in her 2009 Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker.
So if Bieglow’s upcoming film, a retelling of the Navy SEAL raid last year that killed Osama bin Laden, seems especially true-to-life, that’s because she got advice directly from the source. According to Defense Department and CIA documents obtained by the conservative watchdog organization Judicial Watch, Bigelow and her fellow producers—particularly screenwriter Mark Boal (who also wrote The Hurt Locker)—consulted with officials with knowledge of the bin Laden operation, one of whom was a “planner, operator and commander of SEAL Team Six,” the special-operations unit that carried out the mission in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Among the documents released by Judicial Watch, which obtained them through a Freedom of Information Act request, are transcripts of several meetings and conversations between Bigelow, Boal and government agencies. Of particular interest are the notes from a meeting held last July 14 in which CIA officials interviewed the filmmakers when granting them access to information about the bin Laden mission.
According to the transcript, Michael Vickers, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, told Boal that Leon Panetta, who at the time of bin Laden’s death was still the director of the CIA, was “very interested in supporting” the film. The filmmakers were also granted access to a CIA location known as “The Vault” where some of the planning for the bin Laden took place.
Bigelow and Boal started planning the movie, now titled Zero Dark Thirty, well before bin Laden was killed. But after the Abbottabad raid, the film clearly needed an overhaul. Last August, The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd wrote in a column that as a way to boost President Obama’s reputation as a tough decision-maker, the White House granted the filmmakers “top-level access to the most classified mission in history.”
Dowd’s article prompted an investigation by House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King (R-N.Y.). to determine if Bigelow and her crew were granted access to any classified material. Judicial Watch’s findings certainly suggest that they were, and the group is playing it as a sign of direct collaboration between Hollywood and a White House focused on re-election.
“It is both ironic and hypocritical that the Obama administration stonewalled Judicial Watch’s pursuit of the bin Laden death photos, citing national security concerns, yet seemed willing to share intimate details regarding the raid to help Hollywood filmmakers release a movie ‘perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost’ to the Obama campaign,” Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch’s president, said in a summary accompanying the document dump.
King was equally peeved. “After reviewing these emails, I am even more concerned about the possible exposure of classified information to these filmmakers, who as far as I know, do not possess security clearances,” he said in a press release today.
The White House rebuffed Judicial Watch’s accusations, with National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor repeating comments made last year by Press Secretary Jay Carney calling it “ridiculous” and “simply false” that Bigelow and Boal were show top-secret information, The Huffington Post reported.
But one thing Judicial Watch definitely got wrong: The release date for Zero Dark Thirty, which the group says is slated to open on October 12, just weeks before the presidential election. Bigelow’s film, in fact, opens on December 19 after being pushed back from an October release. However, October could bring the debut of another film about the bin Laden mission, Code Name Geronimo. That movie’s producer, Harvey Weinstein, is a major bundler for Obama’s campaign, and in 2004 released the Michael Moore documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 at the height of the race between President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry.
