Mark Boal, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Hurt Locker, was as gape-mouthed as anyone while watching the 2016 election and its aftermath unfold. The president was attacking the press; a friend who works in computer defense was telling him that America had just had its ass kicked by a foreign power. Things looked grim. And Boal, a journalist by trade, started obsessing.
He flew to D.C., talked to pals who work in the national-security arena, and realized something stark: “This was a huge, cataclysmic rupture that we all lived through,” he told me. “There would be a lot of books written about it. A lot of articles. But the election, the whole complex of media and politics and counter-intelligence, it was in so many ways made for television. Maybe television would be the best medium to contain it.”
Its now been two years since Boal announced his intent to jump, for the first time, into the small screen, with a multi-part series focused on the 2016 election, titled Intelligence. Now, after working with a team of investigative journalists including Hugo Lindgren—a former editor of The New York Times Magazine and current president of Boals company, Page 1—and traveling to locations from the U.K. to the Ukraine, the producer and writer of Zero Dark Thirty is finally seeing his plans come into view.
Intelligence will be the first entry in an ambitious anthology Boal intends to use to examine major world events one season at a time, through the purview of the secret inner workings of power. Boal will show-run the 10- to 12-part series and partially direct it, partnering with Showtime Networks and Media Res, Michael Ellenbergs company; the show will likely begin airing in 2020. (Boal calls Showtime "class-leading," and says its current and upcoming slate—including the recent Escape At Dannemora—helped sway a competitive bidding process in the cable network's favor.) His frequent collaborator Megan Ellison will executive produce as well.
I grabbed some time with Boal—who just formed a writers room, which includes, among others, Anna Deavere Smith (Fires in the Mirror) and Alan Poul (Six Feet Under, The Newsroom)—to discuss his new project.
Vanity Fair: The 2016 election and its aftermath is a huge, sprawling tale. What is the story you are telling?
Mark Boal: I think of it as the off-camera history of 2016. The theme of it is: everything you know about that time has gone through an industrial process of editing, and redacting, and shaping, and packaging. The show is ultimately about how truth gets manufactured in America. And the 2016 election is the frame for that theme, told through the eyes of many different characters.
Who are those characters?
I think of America as a real-world Game of Thrones. You have different kingdoms: the kingdom of the media, the kingdom of the F.B.I., the Hillary [Clinton] campaign, the [Donald] Trump campaign. Facebook and Silicon Valley are their own kingdom. Russia is a kingdom. There is this epic battle between those camps for control of the narrative, and for control of information and control of secrets. What were doing is giving you the drones-eye, 10,000-foot view of how those kingdoms fight each other.
I spent time in each of those different kingdoms. I spent time with Chris Steele [the former British intelligence officer who wrote the dossier claiming Russia collected a file of compromising evidence on Trump] and Felix Sater [a Russian-American mobster who served as an adviser to the Trump Organization], to give you both ends of the spectrum. It will be a mix of people you think you know and people youve never heard of.
Mark Boal
By Eric Charbonneau/REX/Shutterstock.
Will Clinton or Trump be portrayed in the series?
There is no actor playing Trump or Clinton. But there will be actors playing real people. But this is not re-enactment. Its closer to Zero Dark Thirty [which employed composite characters] than it is to The People v. O.J. Simpson [which had actors portraying public figures].
Are you suggesting that what you will be giving audiences is the truth?
I think what journalism gives you, at its best, is a list of facts, an assembly of facts. History gives you what happens. And art can give you the truth. There are tens of millions of people who are massively confused. The press holds some responsibility; so do politicians, and so does the intelligence community. The goal is to provide a sense of cohesion and clarity.
Speaking of the intelligence community: there is going to be a fair amount of real estate in the series dedicated to the underlying espionage that was occurring at the time, correct?
Yes. There was a massive intelligence failure, in that a foreign country managed to spin us into a state of complete fucking crisis. Thats a big part of the story. And not to say that its Russias fault that some Obama voters went for Trump, or that its Russias fault that certain [members of] the Obama coalition didnt hold up for Clinton. But you cant do 2016 without talking about spies.
From your research, and the research of the journalists you worked with, is there intelligence you have that hasnt yet been revealed?
There is a huge gap between what people see and hear in the process, and what actually went down inside those different kingdoms. Everything we know in this country is filtered through these different kingdoms. Trump puts one spin on it, which is fine. Obama puts another spin. The press puts their spin on it. And the F.B.I. puts its spin on it. Same can be said of [James] Comey and [Robert] Mueller. At the enRead More – Source
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