Just days after it was announced that Johnny Depp’s Infinitum Nihil Productions and Warner Bros were planning a film based on the life of murdered Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, Columbia and Michael Mann have announced that they’re planning a film based on…the life of murdered Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. Déjà vu anyone?
This one is based on another unpublished book, Death of a Dissident, being written even now by Marina Litvinenko, the dead man’s widow, and Alex Goldfarb, who apparently had close ties with Litvinenko himself. As a free bonus, it also comes with the life story rights to Mrs Litvinenko. Apparently this book will focus more on the Russian power structure enforced by the KGB and its successor the FRS, and the “Wild West capitalism” (think Deadwood) that followed glasnost, with Litvinenko caught between those two colossal forces.
Warners bid on this book as well as the other (presumably to keep control of the subject matter) and offered to match the highest bid when the book was auctioned on Friday, but Columbia’s offer won the day. And in any case, with several other Litvinenko themed books about to come out (one titled “Polonium”, and one written by Litvinenko himself in 2002) it might not have helped.
So which project will make it off the ground first? Michael Mann pointed out to Variety that the last time he faced a rival project, with a proposed Jim Carrey-Chris Nolan film about Howard Hughes, he enlisted Martin Scorsese and made sure that The Aviator was the one to make it to cinemas. On the other hand, he wanted to make Gates of Fire for years and that’s been pushed ever further onto the back burner by rival Greek projects like Alexander, Troy and now 300, which deals with the same events. In this case, only time will tell. Let’s just hope that neither of them resorts to sneaking some polonium-210 into the other’s non-fat non-dairy chai latte.