Spielberg gets rights to WikiLeaks book for film
The Guardian newspaper of London reported Wednesday that Hollywood icon Steven Spielberg secured the rights to a book written by Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding about the infamous founder of the document-dumping website WikiLeaks.
The site came under fire last year for disseminating classified State Department memos and U.S. government logs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
DreamWorks, the studio Spielberg founded with producers Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen in 1994, will back the untitled project, which still needs a cast, director and screenwriter, the Guardian reported.
The ending may also be up in the air. Assange is under so-called "mansion arrest" in England while fighting extradition to Sweden for a sex crimes charge, which he denies. A British court granted the Swedish government's request to extradite Assange, and he is appealing the ruling. The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the Swedish Bar Association is investigating one of Assange's lawyers for allegedly providing misleading statements during the extradition proceedings.
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DreamWorks has also secured the rights to a book written by a former Assange associate, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the Guardian reported, prompting speculation that the film will resemble last year's "The Social Network." The film, which won an Oscar Sunday for best adapted screenplay, told a story about the creation of Facebook and its founder using information from lawsuits filed against Zuckerberg and the book "The Accidental Billionaires."
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Other WikiLeaks movies being developed include one by Alex Gibney, who directed the Oscar-nominated documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," the Guardian reported.
