Tony Gilroy on why it took decades to make ‘Beirut’

‘Last Men in Aleppo’, ‘Newtown’ among Peabody docu winners

LOS ANGELES, April 17, (RTRS): Tony Gilroy, the screenwriter of the new political thriller “Beirut,” says that he originally completed the script in the early 1990s, thinking that production company Interscope would give it a green light.

Instead, “it just disappears and goes in a bin,” Gilroy tells Variety’s “PopPolitics” on SiriusXM, before the company, searching for material that it already owned, finally revived it two decades later with Brad Anderson directing.

Jon Hamm plays Mason Skiles, a diplomat in 1972 Beirut, then a thriving, cosmopolitan center of the Middle East, whose life is upended when a group of terrorists kills his wife. Ten years later, having switched careers, he reluctantly returns to the city, torn apart by civil war. The CIA convinces him to help negotiate the release of one their agents, one of his former colleagues, who the Reagan administration fears will give up intelligence secrets.

Gilroy thinks that the politics were a bit too controversial at the time he wrote it.

“The PLO is corrupt. The Reagan White House is a hornet’s nest of bad ideas. And Israel doesn’t come across well at all. Israel is incredibly and aggressively waiting at the border waiting to invade, looking for an excuse,” Gilroy says. “Pick your poison. The unblinking candor with which the movie objectively observes those three factions made it untenable at the time.”

Gilroy wrote the ice skating movie “The Cutting Edge,” which was released in 1992, and it was during that time that one of that film’s producers, who had once worked for the CIA, got him interested in doing a movie about a negotiator. Gilroy said that he was especially interested in Thomas Friedman’s book, “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” and in particular was intrigued by the setting of much of the story in the winter of 1982, an especially explosive time in Lebanon.

“I am telling the film through the perspective of someone who loved the place very deeply,” Gilroy says of Hamm’s character. “Understood it. Planned on spending his life there, and has seen that paradise lost.”

“The loss of it, and the loss of what it was, is just staggering, because it was the most cosmopolitan, people came from all over the Middle East to be there. It was glamorous. It was chic. It was full of intrigue, and in the mid ‘70s as the civil war broke out, it just descended into such a mess,” he says.

Gilroy said that he has never been to Beirut. It was too dangerous to go there at the time he wrote the script, and now the city’s revitalization has made many parts of it unrecognizeable. “You could never shoot the movie there,” he said. Instead, it was shot in Morocco.

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The Peabody Awards board of jurors announced Monday the nine documentary winners selected for the annual Peabody 30.

The documentaries being honored include stories that tackle current global issues such as the effects of climate change on the world’s coral reefs in “Chasing Coral” and how young Dreamers navigate immigration policy in “Indivisible.” Other topics addressed in the documentaries are gun violence, the crisis in Syria, and the life of Maya Angelou.

Past Peabody Award winners, including Carol Burnett who is the first recipient of the Peabody Career Achievement Award, will be honored at the 77th Annual Peabody Awards Ceremony on May 19 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York. The event will be hosted by comedian Hasan Minhaj, writer and senior correspondent on “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.” Variety is the exclusive media partner for the event.

The Peabody Awards recognize 30 stories each year in television, radio, and digital media that depict important societal problems. The awards are based at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. The Peabody board of jurors is an assembly of critics, journalists, media scholars, and industry professionals. See the documentary winners below: “America ReFramed: Deej” “Chasing Coral” “Indivisible” “Last Men in Aleppo” “Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise” “Newtown” “Oklahoma City” “The Islands and the Whales” “Time: The Kalief Browder Story”.

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Universal Studios has set a Sept. 13, 2019, release date for its untitled comedy with director Danny Boyle and Lily James, Himesh Patel and Kate McKinnon.

Boyle will be directing from a script by Richard Curtis. The Irish writer-director said last month that he’s also been working on script for the 25th James Bond movie with plans to shoot the comedy first, followed by the 007 film at the end of the year.

The comedy will be produced by Working Title’s Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner alongside Matt Wilkinson and Bernie Bellew. Curtis and Boyle will also produce, while Nick Angel and Lee Brazier serve as executive producers. Most plot details are being kept under wraps, but it will be music-themed and set in the 1960s or ‘70s.

The comedy is the first title to be dated for Sept. 13, 2019. It opens a week after the launch of New Line’s horror sequel “It: Chapter 2.”