The story behind Operation Eagle Claw, a top-secret military rescue attempt orchestrated by President Carter, is coming to the big screen. Greenwich Entertainment has acquired Barbara Kopple’s latest, “Desert One.” The company snagged North American theatrical and home entertainment rights to the documentary, which made its world premiere at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. A press release announced the news.
Forty years after the daring mission in Tehran, “Desert One” features never-before-seen archival material and recalls what went on behind the scenes of this exciting chapter of history. “When radical Islamists take fifty-two American diplomats and citizens hostage inside Iran, Carter secretly green-lights the training for a rescue mission. America’s Special Forces soldiers also find themselves in uncharted territory, planning a top-secret rescue of unprecedented scale and complexity. Driven by deep empathy toward the kidnapped Americans, the heart-pounding and unforeseen events the rescue team participated in will forever unite them,” the film’s synopsis details. “The film also presents Iranian perspectives on this important moment in their history. A female Iranian crew filmed overlooked accounts inside that country, one from a man who had been an 11-year-old boy riding a bus through the desert on the night of the mission.”
“’Desert One’ is really about what you do when there are no good answers. To me it’s much more heroic — and interesting — to see people who have ‘the guts to try,’ as one of the men who undertook the mission famously put it,” Kopple told us in an interview.
The two-time Oscar winner hopes audiences reflect on “just how gutsy and valiant these men were. They were on a mission of rescue meant to save lives and prevent war. One of their own choosing. And how selfless, too, President Carter was in undertaking it and how he approached the hostage situation, putting what was right first when some might have focused on the politics of it all, especially in an election year,” she explained. “He told the military leaders when he commissioned the operation, ‘If this succeeds, it will be your success, and if it fails, it will be my failure.’ He interviewed with me for this film and got very real. This is something that has really affected him.”
Kopple added, “I hope this movie will cause those who see it to give more thought to the kind of President and kind of man he was and is, and what kind of a model that might be for anyone in the White House going forward.”
Kopple’s “Harlan County, USA” and “American Dream” won Oscars for Best Documentary Feature. Her other films include “New Homeland,” “A Murder in Mansfield,” and “Gigi Gorgeous: This Is Everything.”
No word on a release date for “Desert One.” The film will be broadcast on History following its theatrical run.
