Movies about America’s spy agencies seem to be all the rage in Hollywood right now. We’ve just had The Good Shepherd and Breach, now Variety says the WB is planning a film about a CIA leak scandal, based on “Fair Game” the memoirs of Valerie Plame.
Hollywood may be eating this stuff up, but audiences seem pretty disinterested. Neither The Good Shepherd nor Breach had exactly stellar box office numbers. There’s room for James Bond and Jason Bourne to take spying in a grittier direction, but Americans still want a little fantasy served with their espionage.
Maybe this attempt will be the one that captures audience attention. It’s about a real life husband and wife: Ambassador Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. Plame was apparently secretly a CIA agent, and in 2003, in an effort to discredit her husband’s views on the war in Iraq the White House outed her. Plame has since left the CIA and filed a Civil lawsuit against such senior White House officials as Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby. I’m sure this was exciting stuff back in 2003, but as a movie it sounds kind of like another politically slanted, procedural yawn. It makes The Good Shepherd seem exciting.
