Oliver Stone’s 9/11 movie was toothless and very different from his usual work. World Trade Center was, putting it mildly, a disappointment. But it may have just been his opening salvo on the new state of the world; it turns out that Stone and Paramount secretly optioned the book Jawbreaker, CIA agent Gary Berntsen’s account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden after 9/11.
This could be a real return to form for Stone – in Jawbreaker Berntsen alleges that Osama bin Laden could have been captured at Tora Bora if the US military had bothered supporting the operation with men and resources.
What’s doubly interesting is that Stone has hired Cyrus Nowrasteh to do the latest draft of Jawbreaker. You may remember him as the guy who wrote The Path to 9/11, the controversial miniseries that distorted the Clinton administration’s attempts to stop Al Qaeda, and included a scene where special ops guys just had to pull a trigger to kill bin Laden but couldn’t get approval from a Clinton White House mired in scandal. Nothing of the sort happened, and the resulting outcry revealed that right wing media interests were behind the show. Nowrasteh himself is a conservative. This isn’t the first time he has worked with Oliver Stone, though; Stone produced the Showtime movie The Day Reagan Was Shot, which Nowrasteh wrote.
By having a known conservative writer on the project Stone is wisely setting up a shield against the inevitable attacks from the right when Jawbreaker is finally released. When that will be is anyone’s guess – Stone has not verified that it will be his next film.