Blackwater film by Ron Shusett & John Chadwell moving forward
By John Chadwell
For those who might be interested in the progress of mine and Ron Shusett’s screenplay, “Blackwater,” I just wanted to let you know that it’s moving forward, perhaps not as rapidly as we would like it to, but all the same it’s still very much alive.
There has been some reorganization with the producers that is not entirely clear to me, but we’ve been told that there are investors lined up to back a slate of films, including Blackwater, now under the Shusett Productions banner.
Money has been spent and more is being raised, and while I am thrilled to have been commissioned to write a script along with a legend such as Ron Shusett, who penned “Alien,” “Total Recall,” “Above the Law” and the first draft of “Minority Report,” I’ll be even more excited when I see that a director is onboard and the project is moving into production.
Preliminary poster for Blackwater film.
While Blackwater the screenplay is moving ever so slowly toward production, Blackwater Worldwide, the company that it is based on, is moving rapidly into new private security territory, as I’ve been tracking here.
I had been joking with mine and Ron’s manager, Tony Ridio and filmmaker Art Camacho, both of whom are associated with Shusett Productions, that perhaps we should start on a sequel about Blackwater going after pirates.
The idea, of course, came from mine and Ron’s other co-writing project, “Hunt of the Sea Wolves,” which is about modern-day pirates who hijack a huge ship carrying natural gas to use it as a weapon of mass destruction. In that story, Special Forces from Homeland Security must stop the pirates-terrorists from carrying out their plot. During my musings I thought Blackwater could be involved in fighting pirates too.
Well, as the news has borne out, that’s exactly what Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, has in mind. He has one ship already fitted out and headed to the Gulf of Aden to act as an escort ship. And there’s talk of perhaps three more such ships to hire out as modern-day privateers to go after modern-day pirates in a remarkable instance of history repeating itself as was the case four hundred years ago in the very same waters.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
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October 29th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
I appreciate your concern about getting it right in the telling of “Blackwater.” As a 20-year veteran who served three tours to Vietnam and Grenada, and a whole lot of other places as part of Navy Combat Camera Group, I have no intention of getting it wrong. I worked with SEAL Team Six and others a couple times in documenting what they do, and my son-in-law was Marine Recon, so I have the highest respect for Special Forces.
I do not have any connection with Blackwater Worldwide and tried to be even handed in telling a fictional story based on factual events. If you look at the posts on this blog about Blackwater, you may notice I never use terms such as “hired guns,” and “hired killers” that others often use. While I’m not going to gloss over their mistakes, I do report on what they’re doing or have supposedly done. I do not judged them because having served in combat, I know the whole story is seldom told.
John Chadwell