IT IS one thing to put your life on the line every day as a bomb disposal expert in the US military, working in hugely dangerous conditions in Iraq and beyond.
It is quite another to see your life’s story made into a critically acclaimed Hollywood film that is the frontrunner to win best picture at the Oscars on Sunday night, without being given a jot of credit for it.
That, at least, is the message coming from a sergeant in the army’s explosive ordnance disposal team who presented himself to the world yesterday at the launch in Michigan of what is being billed as a “multimillion-dollar lawsuit”.
Jeffrey Sarver (38) claims he was the model for the central character in The Hurt Locker, the nerve-jangling Iraq war movie.
At the heart of the film is Will James, played by Jeremy Renner, a risk-taking soldier who presses his bomb disposal colleagues to ever greater and ever more suspenseful acts of derring-do.
The character is entirely fictitious, say the film’s distributors Summit Entertainment, but Sarver and his notoriously tough lawyer Geoffrey Fieger – who has taken on controversial cases such as that of the so-called Doctor Death, Jack Kevorkian – insist that the soldier’s life has in effect been stolen.
The screenplay was written by Mark Boal, a journalist who was embedded with a team of bomb disposal experts in Iraq in order to write a report for Playboymagazine that came out in 2005. Sarver says he was one of the soldiers with whom Boal engaged.
The lawsuit claims that Sarver gave Boal some of his best lines – including the film’s title itself and the nickname for the Will James character, “Blaster One”, which was Sarver’s call signal in Iraq. Far from being fictional, James is Sarver, the lawyer protests.
“They never offered anything,” Sarver told reporters, flanked by Fieger, who vowed to end what he described as a historic injustice in which “Hollywood has made billions exploiting veterans”.
The brouhaha over the intellectual property to the character has come, for The Hurt Locker team, mercifully too late to influence voting in the Oscars. Fieger said he held off announcing the lawsuit until balloting of the 5,777 voting members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences had closed on Tuesday.
However seasoned observers of the frenzied campaigning and lobbying that surround the awards have found it all too predictable that The Hurt Lockerhas come under heavy sniper fire. A relatively low-budget feature, made for $15 million, it is up against the $300 million-plus 3D blockbuster Avatar. And, although by a Hollywood quirk of fate, Kathryn Bigelow, director of The Hurt Locker, was once married to Avatar's director James Cameron, the rivalry has grown ever more ugly.
To be fair to Avatar, the most ugly behaviour has come from The Hurt Locker stable.
On Tuesday the academy for the first time banned a nominee from Oscar night. It scolded Nicolas Chartier, one of the film's producers and main funder, for the "ethical lapse" of circulating an e-mail before voting ended urging members to back The Hurt Lockerand "not a $500 million film" – a clear reference to Avatar.
Chartier will be ostracised at the Kodak Theatre on Sunday night, although should his film win he will be presented with his winner’s statuette at a later date.