http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/595hsjaq.asp
This is a very good article, tells you a lot about how Hollywood kills creativity and innovation. It's a shame they didn't use the original story
Big thanks for posting the weekly standard link....very revealing on how a potentially strong film was reduced.
shareThanks for the article. What could have been?!?
It's interesting to see that Tom Snooze is a no-talent, ass-clown no matter what he puts his hand to. Hopefully Xenu will take him up to heaven to get his 70 virgins soon.
Good article but it still has a while chunk of information missing. Zak Penn was already well known in Hollywood before Suspect Zero was written. This seems to be slanted into making Cruise the bad guy when it was the studio who wanted changes to the script. Also missing is Ben Affleck's involvement for a time on the script. He eventually left the project after telling the studio they should just go back to Penn's original script, it was perfect. He mentioned that in many interviews in the early 20000s. Now that he has some clout as a director, I wish there was a way he could remake this with that draft.
http://bat115.hubpages.com/
the lily-livered Stephen Glass movie, Shattered Glass ?
Volcano remains the high-point of Ray's writing career ?
Billy Ray will be Oscar nominated (might win) for Captain Phillips
shattered glass is one of the best films of that decade
Peter Sarsgard and Hayden Christensen were both amazing
It's a shame they didn't use the original storyI agree. The original would have been much better than what we are served up. share
Yup. That's what's wrong with this movie. It's half interesting serial killer manhunt, half X-File. Either/or would have been fine. A little of both sucks.
"I said no camels, that's five camels, can't you count?"
Thanks for the article lead-- it really helped.
shareKeeping O'Ryan a former FBI profiler rather than remote viewer ... wasn't that CIA, not FBI? ... and Suspect Zero a ghost O'Ryan got a suspicion of when investigating the Green River murders seem as if they would have made far more grounded-in-reality and therefore compelling intrigue. But what intrigues me is why Zak involved the Green River murders in his original screenplay ... did he have some special knowledge about cops' suspicions? Is "suspect zero" a term they came up with? Perhaps there was some politically expedient reason Suspect Zero was changed the way it was. That is not to defend the action. But, then, again, how much can you speculate on an actual case? And if it's not speculation, how much can you give away about an actual case that is not public knowledge?
If you want an official-version movie about the Green River killings, see Frozen Ground which is available to stream on Netflix right now last I knew; it isn't half bad. It does sound to me as if the original Suspect Zero screenplay could have been quite good because it much more rightly might have placed the focus on the ghost, Suspect Zero, weaving his way in and out of things and littering the landscape with bodies possibly wherever other serial killers operated as well. In the current version, he seemed something of an afterthought. I can see how the current version saved the figuring out that they had a serial killer hunting serial killers in an effort to build suspense, but the remote viewing complicated things ... I don't think it was ever explained how that worked with all those numbers, etc., nor how O'Ryan knew Tom had the gift. O'Ryan's suffering, though, was an interesting comment on how such people if indeed they exist could be left with fallout that the government doesn't or can't fix.