The Guy Who Claims to be the Real “Hurt Locker” Guy Wants Money. And for the Ringing in His Ears to Finally Go Away.
The Hurt Locker has been a major Hollywood success story – an Iraq war film that not only won over critics but garnered a large audience as well, and now stands poised to be crowned Best Picture at the Oscars (if it can defeat that girlie flick Avatar). Unfortunately, this feel-good story of the little movie that could has a dark underbelly – apparently, the lead character’s crazy bomb-disposal exploits were taken from real life, but the guy who did the stuff for real has never been acknowledged or paid by producers. That at least is what Master Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver, who is currently suing Hurt Locker producers for millions of dollars, would have us believe. In Sarver’s version of things, Hurt Locker screenwriter Mark Boal based Jeremy Renner‘s adrenaline junkie bomb disposal man on his actual activities in Iraq, and as proof, Sarver offers up a Playboy profile of him written by none other than Mark Boal. Says Sarver’s lawyer Geoffrey Fieger, “The movie disingenuously claims that it’s a fictional account, which is absurd,” adding, “The only fiction here is that they claim that it’s fiction.”
The man at the middle of the controversy, Mark Boal, says Sarver’s version of things is a load of crap, and claims Renner’s character was a composite of various guys he met and wrote about while working in Iraq. “Like a lot of soldiers, [Sarver] identifies with the film, but the character I wrote is fictional,” says Boal. “The film is a work of fiction inspired by many people’s stories, not the life story of any one person.” Sounds to me like Boal is trying to hide behind this fancy Hollywood word “fiction.” Well, I know the real truth when I see it, and the real truth is, brave warrior Sarver is getting shafted by a bunch of crafty elitists, who don’t want to admit that their big brains aren’t clever enough to imagine great explodey action scenes by themselves, so they have to rip off real stories then not give due credit to the bad-asses who don’t just sit behind computers all day but actually do that courageous, death-defying stuff for real. I hope Sarver gets all the millions that are coming to him. And I hope that one day he gets to take a poke at Mark Boal, who should be ashamed of himself. Oh, and by the way – Kathryn Bigelow is way hot, even though she’s grandma-old.
Filed Under: Features
