"The Hurt Locker" Director And Writer Look To Have Veteran's Lawsuit Dismissed
DETROIT (WWJ) - The director and screenwriter of the Oscar Award winning film``The Hurt Locker'' have asked a judge in Los Angeles to dismiss an Iraq war veteran's lawsuit alleging the film is based on him.
Master Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver claims in a lawsuit that the screenwriter and director of the Academy Award winning movie "The Hurt Locker" based the film on him.
Sarver, through his attorney Geoffrey Fieger, says they can prove that screenwriter Mark Boal used Sarver as the bomb technician portrayed by Jeremy Renner in the movie.
"Boal, the screenwriter, wrote a story in Playboy, about a year before he wrote the movie, the stories are identical. The story in Playboy is called, "The Man In The Bomb Suit" and it's a non-fiction story about Sgt.Jeffery Sarver, and all the incidents that he portrays in the story,about Jeffery Sarver, which are true, are in "The Hurt Locker"," says Fieger.
Boal was embedded with Sarver's unit in Iraq in 2004. Boal says that he interviewed more than 50 military personnel who work in bomb disposal units and that Renner's character, named William James, is a composite of many of them.
"They are a multi-billion dollar business and they stole Sgt. Sarver's identity," says Fieger. "They are going to lose."
