It’s clearly the day for Hollywood optioning troubled tales from history, though this one is even more real than the Tehran script. Fox 2000 and Behind Enemy Lines producer John Davis have nabbed the rights to Michael Dobbs’ non-fiction book One Minute To Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev And Castro On The Brink Of Nuclear War.
The studio will develop a Thirteen Days-style thriller based on the true story of a U-2 pilot who got lost and ended up straying into Russian territory, just as the country’s government was looking to heat up the cold war and Fidel Castro was encouraging them to fire all missiles. The pilot eventually got his plane out and landed on a dangerous Alaskan airstrip, but the countries came closer than ever before to war.
Variety is holding its breath .
