A few years ago I offhandedly mentioned that George Clooney should make All The Shah’s Men into a movie. Well, after the whole BP oil spill I started thinking again about Syriana (and how effing good it was) and All The Shah’s Men (and ditto) and then I wrote this long blog post right here in this space all about how the rights to the book All The Shah’s Men really should be purchased and/or developed with Sam Rockwell as Kermit Roosevelt, the badass Jamshid Hashempour as Mohammed Mossadeq, Danny Pudi as Mohammad-Rezā Shāh Pahlavi, and either George Clooney or Stephen Gaghan directing.
Then Google tells me somebody named Matt Bird beat me to the blog post. Minus the perfect casting, but his write up is great:
Genre: Spy / Historical
Premise: A determined American spy develops an outrageous plan to overthrow the fragile democracy of Iran in 1953, at the request of the oil company that would become known as BP.
About: I haven’t heard anything about this getting adapted so far, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t on a development board somewhere.
Writer: Kinzer is a veteran New York Times correspondent who has written plenty of books about U.S. dirty dealings overseas. This book became an unexpected hit in 2003, as U.S. efforts in the Middle East fell apart and people started getting more serious about the question “Why do they hate us?” Unfortunately, it’s gotten even more timely since, due to the BP connection.
The whole writeup is pretty stellar. The book had me at hello. Read this other blog post.
