The Chilean miners finally decide on a movie deal

Last year’s rescue of 33 trapped Chilean miners briefly captivated the world, but until it’s been dramatized in a big-screen motion picture, one can never be certain that it really happened. So finally producer Mike Medavoy has moved forward on affirming its place in our collective history by landing the film rights and hiring The Motorcycle Diaries’ screenwriter Jose Rivera to draft a script about the mine’s collapse and the subsequent experiences of the men trapped inside. And of course, most of those experiences have never been recounted anywhere, as the remarkably media-savvy miners apparently spent at least some of their time down there hashing out the best way to maximize the selling of their story, having made a pact to “keep the key details of their ordeal secret until a buyer was found,” then shopped it around pretty much the second they got out (right after they got done explaining their mistresses to their wives). It definitely paid off, as in the words of one of the survivors, they now have the “only official and authorized film about what we lived in the San José mine,” and don’t have to settle for some secondhand crap “directed” by Entourage’s Vinny Chase.

 
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