Los Angeles, July 9: Actor Nicolas Cage will star as a real-life policeman who survived the collapse of the World Trade Center in what would be one of Hollywood's first films to dramatize the Sept 11 attacks on America, Paramount Pictures said on Friday.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone is on board to direct the untitled movie, which centres on the story of the last two men - a pair of Port Authority police officers rescued from the rubble of the twin towers, Paramount said.
The two officers, Sgt. John McLoughlin and William Jimeno, sold their life rights to the studio, providing the basis for the original screenplay by relative newcomer Andrea Berloff.
Cage, who won an Academy Award for Leaving Las Vegas, will play McLoughlin. No other casting decisions have been made, Paramount said.
The Viacom Inc-owned studio has given producers the go-ahead to begin work on the film, getting an apparent leg up on another 9/11 feature in development at rival studio Columbia Pictures, a unit of Sony Corp.
Columbia announced in February it had optioned screen rights to 102 Minutes, a book by two New York Times reporters chronicling the interval between the crash of the first hijacked airliner into the World Trade Center and the collapse of the first tower.
No director or actors have been signed to the 102 Minutes project, but
Columbia has received a first script draft by Billy Ray, the writer and director behind Shattered Glass, according to Hollywood trade paper Daily Variety.
Word that Paramount had a film in the works dramatizing the 9/11 attacks came a day after London was rocked by a series of deadly bomb blasts that renewed anxieties about terror threats. A studio insider said the timing of its announcement was less than â??idealâ??, precipitated only because Variety broke the story in its Friday edition.
The fact that at least two major studios have embraced the subject of 9/11 marks a huge shift in Hollywood's attitude toward depiction of the suicide hijackings that claimed nearly 3,000 lives and prompted the US global war on terrorism.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, studios and broadcasters steered clear of any themes considered evocative of the tragedy. The trend has gradually swung the other way.
Until now, stories about 9/11 have remained the province of film and TV documentaries, television dramas, or in big-screen fiction like Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds featuring 9/11-like imagery.
ABC is planning a mini-series drama based on the â??9/11 Commission Reportâ??, the best-selling official government account of events surrounding the attacks. NBC recently pulled the plug on a similar project.
