‘Hurt Locker’ and ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Writer Mark Boal Prepping 2016 Election Script

As a lifelong journalist, Mark Boal has always been an accomplished chronicler of modern American war, but he only got famous for it when he took his act to the movies. Boal earned an Academy Award for writing The Hurt Locker and then scooped up a nomination a few years later when he re-teamed with Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty. The partners-in-war-crime will reunite for a film set during the 1967 riots in Detroit, but you can’t keep Boal away from hot-button geopolitical issues for long. Today brings the news that for his next trick, Boal will tackle what’s shaping up to be one of the greatest stories in American history.

The Hollywood Reporter ran an item stating that Boal would dramatize that which needs no dramatization in his next work, by which I mean he’s tackling the 2016 Presidential election. Under the auspices of Annapurna head Megan Ellison, Boal’s drafting a political drama that will run between eight and ten hours, for release as a televised miniseries. They have yet to land a channel for broadcasting the project, but they shouldn’t have any trouble selling it — Trump’s the topic on everybody’s mind, and as production schedules move along in the months to come, we can expect documentaries, TV series, and feature films.

And while a healthy number of those will probably be quite bad, Boal’s project holds a lot of promise. It’s a positive sign that he’s enlisted former New York Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren to round up a team of investigative journalists for research purposes. Boal’s attention to detail and adherence to fact would have to be the saving graces of this controversy-courting project.