Jerry Bruckheimer Shopping Afghan War Tale 'Horse Soldiers' To Produce

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by Ryan Sartor
December 5, 2011 11:50 AM
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A lot of conservatives were huffing and puffing in the 1990s when Disney bought Miramax Films and started distributing non-family rare like “Pulp Fiction.” Well, here’s hoping you’re happy: Miramax is dead and a few years back, Disney CEO Rich Ross announced that he would no longer be greenlighting any film that wasn’t family oriented and/or a franchise, not to mention that nothing coming out of the mouse house would be rated R.

Because of Ross’s strict policy, producer Jerry Bruckheimer is left looking like a champion of the arts in comparison. A few years back, Ross killed Bruckheimer’s proposed Randall Wallace-scripted, WWII epic “Killing Rommel,” and now Bruckheimer’s going around Hollywood hat in hand, trying to get some of that “War Horse” money for his own equestrian military epic “Horse Soldiers.”

The film is based on the Doug Stanton non-fiction book about “12 elite special forces soldiers and CIA operatives who secretly invaded Afghanistan after 9/11. They arrived on horses and helped Afghan fighters capture the city of Mazar-i-Sharif and topple the Taliban.”

It sounds like Bruckheimer’s most legitimate producing work since 2001’s “Black Hawk Down,” and here’s hoping he can get this thing made. The Ted Tally (“The Silence of the Lambs”) adaptation was rewritten by Peter Craig (“The Town”), with Nicolai Fuglsig attached to direct. Fuglsig is that Danish commercials director who created that Sony Bravia ad that featured 250,000 balls dropping on San Francisco and he's also attached to a futuristic take on Robin Hood over at Warner Bros. [Deadline]