George Clooney Takes The Challenge

[Hunter Rider]

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=47957

Source: Variety
August 12, 2008


George Clooney has bought the rights to Jonathan Mahler's legal thriller "The Challenge," about the long campaign waged by U.S. Navy lawyer Charles Swift and Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal to ensure a fair trial for Salim Hamdan, the bodyguard and driver of Osama bin Laden.

Variety says the project will be developed through Clooney and Grant Heslov's Smoke House production company.

As with any Smoke House project, The Challenge remains a potential directing, writing and starring vehicle for Clooney.

Hamdan was sentenced Aug. 7 by a panel of military officers at Guantanamo Bay to a prison term of 66 months, including time already served. The Yemeni-born convict was found guilty of material support for terrorism but cleared of the more serious charges of conspiracy to commit murder, seen by some analysts as a victory for retired naval officer Swift's efforts.

While it's unclear where the movie would end, Mahler's book ends with the landmark 2006 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the military tribunals ordered for Hamdan and other Guantanamo Bay detainees violated the Geneva Convention and the Uniform Code for Military Justice.

Very Clooney.....

 

[tzarinna]

I only think naughty thoughts when I think of Clooney. So I'm assuming he'll be in DC filming soon?

 

[Hunter Rider]

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=52532

Clooney and Sorkin Take The Challenge
Source: Variety
February 3, 2009


Warner Bros. Pictures has set Aaron Sorkin to write The Challenge, a courtroom drama for George Clooney's Smoke House, reports Variety.

Clooney is producing with Smoke House partner Grant Heslov. Clooney may direct and hopes to play Navy lawyer Charles Swift in the drama about the effort by Swift and Georgetown U. law professor Neal Katyal to ensure a fair trial for Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan, who'd been held at Guantanamo Bay for five years.

WB and Smoke House got started on the project over the summer by optioning Jonathan Mahler book "The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power."

The trade adds that the courtroom drama wouldn't debate Hamdan's guilt or innocence but chart the dogged efforts of the two lawyers who sue the president because they feel the U.S. government has broken the law and violated the Constitution.