Fox 2000 has acquired the movie rights to Michael Dobbs’ true-life book, One Minute To Midnight: Kennedy, Khruschev and Castro On The Brink Of Nuclear War, an account of a largely forgotten episode in the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s.
We’re guessing that the title will be shortened to One Minute To Midnight for the big screen.
The film, like the New York Times best-seller, will focus on Charles Maultsby, a U-2 pilot who accidentally blundered into Russian airspace at a time when the Soviets and the Americans were ready to push the red button at the slightest provocation. With his petrol running out, and the need to get back to neutral territory pressing with each minute, Maultsby has the fate of the world resting in his hands while, down below, both sides are wondering whether his flight is the first shot in a larger war.
Sounds pretty interesting, and even if we know the outcome (we’re not all dead, so clearly World War III didn’t happen… at that time, anyway), movies like Thirteen Days have shown that tension can nevertheless be squeezed out of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The movie will be produced by John Davis, who has shown an interest in this sort of material before – he produced Behind Enemy Lines in 2001.