Plame's Spy Novel Coming From Penguin in 2012

We heard last year that notoriously outed CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was working on a spy novel with mystery writer Sarah Lovett.  Today Deadline reveals that the publisher will be new Penguin imprint Blue Rider Press, and that the book will be out in 2012.  Plame previously penned a non-fiction memoir. She was also the subject of a Decemberists song, of Bourne Identity director Doug Liman's excellent 2010 spy movie Fair Game (review here), and served as a techinical advisor on the first season Liman's CIA-set TV series Covert Affairs (review here).  Covert Affairs: Season One is out today on DVD from Universal.

Special Features Revealed For Covert Affairs DVD

We already heard that USA's excellent freshman spy series Covert Affairs is coming to DVD on May 17th from Universal.  Now DVD Active has the list of special features. "Extras will include feature commentaries on 3 episodes featuring stars Piper Perabo and Christopher Gorham; executive producers Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) and David Bartis; and show creators Matt Corman and Chris Ord, deleted scenes, a gag reel, an exclusive tour of the Covert Affairs set, featurettes ("Welcome to The Farm", "Blind Insight"), and a descriptive narration of the visual elements of the series for visually impaired viewers." Sadly no commentary with technical advisor Valerie Plame Wilson or featurettes on the real CIA as a workplace like I'd hoped for, but still a good assortment of extras! I'm glad, as I loved this series.

Read my review of the Covert Affairs pilot here.

Upcoming Spy DVDs: Covert Affairs

TV Shows On DVD reports that USA's summer hit Covert Affairs (which made my own list of the best new spy TV shows of 2010) will hit DVD on May 17.  Covert Affairs stars Piper Perabo as freshman CIA officer Annie Walker. While there are some of the soap opera elements that have haunted the genre since Alias, it's mainly a spy show as workplace dramady.  I've always been a fan of the "desk" side of the spy drama, and I think Covert Affairs handles the office politics better than any other US spy series I can think of.  Certainly better than the histrionics of CTU!  Of course, this is still a USA show, which means it's also got its share of in-the-field excitement as well.  It's a solid, fairly believable character-driven espionage series. 

No extras have been announced for this release, but I hope that changes.  With a show like this that goes out of its way more than most to depict a fairly realistic CIA, I'd love to see some featurettes about that attention to detail and attempts at realism.  I'd also like to see an interview or hear a commentary with the show's technical advisor (and obvious inspiration for Kari Matchett's character), Valerie Plame-Wilson, who has already recorded a commentary track for the DVD release of Doug Liman's movie about her, Fair Game (review here). Liman also produces Covert Affairs.

Covert Affairs: Season 1, a 3-disc set, will retail for $59.98, but obviously it will be findable cheaper than that.  This artwork is a mock-up, subject (and likely) to change. 

Read my review of the Covert Affairs pilot here.

Upcoming Spy DVDs: Fair Game (2010)

DVD Active reports that Summit Entertainment will release Bourne Identity director Doug Liman's latest spy movie, Fair Game, on DVD and Blu-ray on March 29. Liman finds the Le Carré-esque spy story at the heart of the infamous Valerie Plame affair, and makes the most of it, bringing the same "in the moment" sort of hand-held, real-time camera work that captured the action in Bourne to the conference rooms of CIA headquarters in Langley–and making intense debates just as exciting as a car chase! (Read my full review here.) The only extra seems to be a commentary with the real Valerie Plame Wilson (played marvelously by Naomi Watts in the film) and Joe Wilson (played by Sean Penn), which is a bit disappointing.  I would have like to hear from Liman. Still, Fair Game is a fantastic spy movie (among my favorites of the year), and well worth checking out at home if you missed its limited theatrical run. Retail is $22.99 for the DVD and $30.49 for the Blu-ray, but both will inevitably be available online and in stores for less than that.

Movie Review: Fair Game (2010)

It’s interesting that both Bourne directors decided to make movies about the search for Iraqi WMD that was going on at about the time that the first Bourne movie hit theaters–and that both, though featuring very different approaches to the subject matter–turned out to be excellent spy movies. Whereas Paul Greengrass’s Green Zone (reviewed here) focused on thrilling, Bourne-like action, Doug Liman delivers an equally thrilling entry in the more realistic, serious side of the spy genre sometimes referred to as the “Desk Spy” sub-genre. (In this case, that moniker is a bit of a misnomer, though, as the protagonist does indeed go into the field. But the film’s most exciting moments are those in Langley conference rooms.) And refreshingly, in stark contrast to the Bourne series, neither of these films vilify the CIA!

Fair Game (not to be confused with the 1995 Cindy Crawford vehicle!) tells the story of a woman who, against her wishes, became the most famous American spy of the last decade: Valerie Plame Wilson. The story became a hot-button political issue sparking fierce debate on both sides of the aisles, but at its core it always seemed to me a classic spy yarn that could be torn straight out of Le Carré: a covert operative running dangerous missions in the field is exposed and hung out to dry by her bureaucratic masters for political reasons. That’s a log-line that with little tweaking could easily be applied to at least three Le Carré books (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Looking Glass War and The Honourable Schoolboy) and probably more. It’s the stuff of classic spy stories! And that’s exactly the approach that Liman takes to this material: he tells the spy story. In doing so (as with the best spy fiction), he tells many other stories too, and a film that begins as a flat-out spy movie very naturally morphs into a political thriller and a family drama by its denouement. In a genre landscape rife with popcorn explorations of spy marriages (Undercovers, True Lies and particularly Liman’s own Mr. and Mrs. Smith), it’s very interesting to see a fact-based tale of a marriage rocked by one spouse’s secret life. In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Liman used conventions of the spy genre to humorously explore relationship issues. In Fair Game, he achieves a blistering combination of spy movie and family drama. The former had a gunfight at the kitchen table; the latter has a disagreement that leads to raised voices in the same setting... and the stakes feel much higher in the latter.

Naomi Watts is excellent as Plame, as is Sean Penn as her former ambassador husband, Joe Wilson. Even before Valerie’s exposure, her career inflicts constant trauma on their marriage. Valerie’s ceaseless business trips to Kuala Lumpur or Amman, Jordan take their toll on her home life. Her young children ask when their mom will be back, and their father can’t give them an answer. Even he doesn’t know where she is or how long she’ll be gone, though he is one of the few people who knows her true profession.

Besides the intense portrait of a possibly decaying marriage, Fair Game shines as a spy thriller. The movie opens with Valerie undercover in Kuala Lumpur. These scenes may be familiar ones, but that familiarity is essential to establishing the genre before shaking up its formula. That genre familiarity is aided immeasurably by an excellent score by John Powell of the percussion-heavy, pounding variety with which he has redefined the sound of the spy movie in the last decade. It occurred to me watching this film that Powell is really the first person to do that since John Barry defined it to begin with in the Sixties. Both composers have worked within a wide spectrum of sub-genres, from outlandish fantasy (You Only Live Twice in Barry’s case; Knight and Day for Powell) to grounded, serious action (From Russia With Love; the Bourne films) to gritty drama full of bureaucratic hurdles (The Ipcress File; Fair Game), applying their signature motifs across the board. While many great composers have worked in the spy genre over the last several decades (and some have experimented with totally different sorts of scores), no one has so exhaustively overhauled the sound of spy movies as Powell. Barry’s jazz-infused style remained the expected and accepted soundtrack of the genre up until the 2000s (when it may have been partially done in by Austin Powers). Now it’s propulsive percussion–which offers somewhat less room for variation, but perfectly compliments the high-energy spy movies being made today–and Powell brings that in spades to Fair Game, signaling spy to the audience as loudly as Barry-like trumpet flourishes did in the past. Granted, the visuals and the settings do that as well, but in the case of real-life subject matter that could have been handled a number of different ways, it’s important to establish the territory as early as possible.
 

The scenes of Valerie recruiting assets overseas and eventually sending them into harm’s way deliver exactly what fans of the serious spy genre want, but as with many of the best examples of that side of the genre, the scenes back in the office are even more rewarding. Liman operates the camera himself, and brings the same handheld craziness for which the Bourne movies are famous not to running-through-Baghdad action scenes, but to meetings in Langley conference rooms! The constantly shifting, cinema verite-style camera work combined with naturalistic lighting really makes you feel like you’re there–and it’s harrowing! Fans of the Le Carré school of spy novels know how harrowing and suspenseful a good author can make the bureaucratic side of spying, but I’ve never seen the day-to-day business of CIA officers conveyed with such a sense of urgency on film before. You really get the sense that this is important work, and that lives and indeed the very fate of the nation depend on decisions made within these cramped walls. If the Bourne movies (particularly Greengrass’s–for better or for worse) redefined the way that action is portrayed in spy movies, Fair Game redefines the way intrigue is portrayed. If there’s ever a movie version of The Sandbaggers, it should be filmed like this.

Despite accusations from people who probably didn’t see the film, Paul Greengrass’s Green Zone managed to explore the WMD issue without becoming a political film. I can’t say the same for Doug Liman’s Fair Game, although despite the presence of outspoken activist Sean Penn (whose own extra-textual persona unfortunately distracts from what’s really a very wonderful performance during a patriotic speech at the movie’s finale), the director approaches what became a hotly politicized story about as apolitically as could be possible. Liman doesn’t engage in any of the games of speculation so popular among media pundits on both sides about how high up in the administration the decision to expose an undercover CIA operative went. Instead he sticks to the non-controversial official version of the facts, laying the blame squarely on the shoulders of the only person convicted of a crime in the matter, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and self-confessed State Department source Richard Armitage.

Libby is the only key figure in the Administration portrayed with any substantial screen time by an actor. The only time we ever see the President or the Vice President, it’s done using actual TV footage from the time–not cut into the movie directly, but playing on televisions in the scenes. It’s a tricky approach that could have gone wrong, but it works. Having lived through this little bit of history so recently, I also found it neat to see Liman’s interpretation of what went on behind the scenes of those well-known soundbites. He gives the feeling of filling in the blanks, which works well. In a bold move, he solidifies that approach by ending with footage of the real Valerie Plame testifying before Congress instead of Watts. It’s a jarring move, but Liman pulls it off and it serves as a good reminder that this sort of intrigue really happens, and isn't just the realm of Le Carré and his ilk.

Fair Game is an excellent movie that doesn’t dwell on the political debate fueled by the events depicted, but instead delivers an incredibly satisfying spy story and family drama. The lead actors turn in excellent performances that should be recognized come awards season, but ultimately what this movie will be remembered for in the annals of spy film history is the way Doug Liman (aided by John Powell) brazenly redefines the backroom intrigue of the Serious side of the genre. Fair Game is to Serious spy movies what the Bourne films proved to be to Action ones.

Valerie Plame Wilson Writing A Spy Novel

The AP reports that Valerie Plame Wilson (who previously penned the memoir Fair Game) is following in the footsteps of other famous spies-turned-novelists like Stella Rimington, John Le Carré and Graham Greene.  The outed CIA covert operative is collaborating on a spy novel with mystery writer Sarah Lovett (Dark Alchemy).  "I was always irked by how pop culture portrayed female CIA operatives," she tells the AP. "I wanted to write a thriller that was more realistic." Plame Wilson singles out Alias in particular as lacking realism.  (What?!  You mean real spies aren't always related to or in love with one another? While piecing together ancient doomsday devices?  I'm shocked!)  She did apparently look up to Jennifer Garner in one respect though. "I used to look at Alias," she says, "[a]nd I'd say to myself, 'I wish I had that body!'" Well, now she kind of does: Plame Wilson is played by the gorgeous Naomi Watts in Doug Liman's new movie based on her book, Fair Game ("It could be worse," she jokes) and another stunning blonde, Kari Machett, plays a character seemingly inspired by her on USA's Covert Affairs.  Plame Wilson serves as a technical advisor on Covert Affairs, which is produced by Liman.  Fair Game, which I've been very excited to see ever since The Hollywood Reporter reviewed it at Cannes audaciously declared that it "might be one of the best spy movies ever," opens tomorrow. See the trailer here.

Trailer For Doug Liman's New Spy Movie, Fair Game

Yahoo has the trailer for Fair Game, the film The Hollywood Reporter said "might be one of the best spy movies ever." And so does YouTube!  The trailer seems to confirm that while clearly in a different league from his earlier spy films, The Bourne Identity and Mr. and Mrs. Smith,  Doug Liman's latest is clearly a spy film, and not mired in political diatribe as some had feared.  To me, Valerie Plame's story (an intelligence operative exposed and hung out to dry at the whims of politicians in her own government) sounds like it could be ripped out of a Le Carré novel.  It may have gotten lost in the ensuing blather of political pundits on both sides, but at its heart this is a great spy story, and it looks like that is the aspect that Liman has chosen to play up.  Judge for yourself:

The Spy Story As Workplace Dramady
TV Review: Covert Affairs

Judging from the pilot, USA has another winning spy series in their line-up–a worthy stable mate for Burn Notice. I really enjoyed the first episode of Covert Affairs. There’s a lot of Alias in it–and a dash of Sex and the City for the ladies, in the form of name-dropping high end fashion and shoe brands–but Covert Affairs’ unique contribution to the genre is that it begins at the beginning, on rookie agent Annie Walker’s (The Prestige's Piper Perabo) first day on the job. We get a brief taste of her training on the CIA’s famous “farm,” but then she’s pulled out early for mysterious reasons and put straight on the job. This way, the audience is introduced to the CIA the same way as Annie. She’s got first day jitters, and messes up matters of basic routine, like trying (and failing) to pass through the turnstyles before she’s gotten her access badge. She meets an intimidating new boss, engages in exploratory flirtations with co-workers, tries to find her (Louboutin-clad) footing in an unfamiliar and intimidating environment–all the trials and tribulations of starting a new job that any viewer can relate to, only moreso, because she’s working at the CIA!

I’ve always responded to the “workplace drama” (or, in this case, “dramady”) side of the spy genre. Many of my favorite genre entries focus as much on office politics and the hurdles of petty bureaucracy as they do on the formalities of espionage: The Sandbaggers, Queen and Country and the entire oeuvre of John Le Carré, to name but a few. I think the secret of Le Carré’s popularity, in fact, is that he hit upon a unique way to make workplace drama and office politics exciting. Everyone in the world can relate to the machinations of nefarious co-workers, but they’d be boring to read about if the stakes weren’t as high as the very fate of the nation. Covert Affairs is much, much lighter fare than Le Carré, but taps into that same vein of spy story as workplace dramady.

The stellar production design by Production Designer Franco De Cotiis, Art Director Aleks Marinkovich and Set Decorator Zeljka Alosinac further reinforce the notion of Covert Affairs as foremost a workplace series. I loved their CIA sets, which manage to seem very “workplace-y” as well as spy-ish with the requisite futurism, but not too much of it. This steel cubicle-filled CIA interior looks like a place where people would actually work, with just a hint of Ken Adamish spy vibe lurking in the details.

Even the requisite office entanglements of a workplace dramadey that can easily go so wrong (see: 24) are handled well in the pilot. I was amused and engrossed by the rocky and competitive relationship between two married CIA officers and rival department heads, Joan (Kari Matchett) and Arthur (the great Peter Gallagher) Campbell. She’s convinced that he’s cheating on her and uses Agency resources in an attempt to prove it, but the talented actors play that in a believable and humorous way, so it doesn’t stretch credulity the way that everybody sleeping with everybody else does at CTU. In fact, the writing is quite clever when Arthur calls Joan on her dubious tactics:

“You’re using valuable Agency resources to track me.”

“That’s not a denial.”

“Why can’t you be a good CIA wife and just trust me?”

“Because I’m not a CIA wife. I’m a wife who works for the CIA.”

Of course, there’s still leeway for everyone to sleep with everyone else in future episodes, but based on the pilot I have faith in the writers and actors to handle it well. The groundwork for a young, attractive, oversexed CIA is carefully laid out here when Annie’s Dixon (which is to say the man on the other end of the radio when she’s on missions), Auggie (Christopher Gorham), informs her that the CIA was on a hiring freeze before 9/11, so now half the employees have under five years' experience (or something like that). Furthermore, the Agency encourages dating within for security reasons. How convenient! But it rings true. In fact, many details about this CIA ring fairly true, by television standards. This may be because one of the Agency’s most famous former employees, Valarie Plame-Wilson (to whom Matchett actually bares a more than passing resemblance), serves as the technical advisor, no doubt through her connection to executive producer Doug Liman, who made a movie about her life. (I’m frankly surprised that the network’s publicity didn’t play up this angle more.) Of course, no espionage television series is ever going to do much more than pay lip service to the reality of the job before moving onto the sort of shoot-em-up hijinks that we’re all clamoring to see. I now present said lip service verbatim, which comes after Annie has been fired upon by a sniper while on her very first assignment.

Joan: You know, some operatives go an entire career without seeing a bullet fired.

Annie: Is that supposed to make me feel better?

Joan: It’s supposed to make you realize this is unusual.

We’ll see just how unusual such occurrences prove to be in subsequent episodes, but I’m guessing they happen at least weekly. And I wouldn’t have it any other way, of course. After all, I do want escapist action from my spy TV as well as relatable office intrigue!

When it comes, that action is generally well-handled. The scene in which the sniper shoots up a hotel room–with Annie in it–is visceral enough to belie the show’s Bourne pedigree (again through Liman), and a car chase is excitingly shot as well. (During it, however, Annie mutters things to herself like, “D.E.C. Method: Determine, Evade, Counterpursuit,” which kind of made me long for Michael Westen’s voiceovers instead–a much better delivery mechanism for such tradecraft secrets.) A skydiving sequence amidst which the opening titles unfold is particularly breathtaking, with aerial footage as good as any I’ve ever seen on TV.

Covert Affairs certainly isn’t without cliches, but it gets most of them out of the way right up front, intercut within a lie detector test framing device that (quite cleverly, actually) tells us all the backstory we need to know about Annie. We see a three-week romance with a mystery man who’s bound to play a big role down the line (in fact, we glimpse him again later, in a very different context), and it unfolds in nothing but cliches: running on a beach, candle-lit sex, a parting note explaining little. Auggie is blind and that’s every bit as precious as you fear it will be, but the story behind his blindness isn’t bad (he already worked for the CIA when he was blinded by an IED in Iraq) and Gorham sells it well enough (even all those tired Daredevil tropes like identifying a woman by her perfume) that by the end of the episode it just seems natural. The producers carefully avoid my least favorite spy show cliche, typified in Alias with everyone important working out of “the CIA’s Los Angeles branch.” No, Annie’s CIA is actually in Langley, and the show is set in and around Washington DC (or at least Toronto’s decent approximation thereof, mixed in with some establishing shots of key landmarks) rather than asking us to believe that the real epicenter of America’s intelligence community is LA or, in the case of USA’s other spy hit, Miami. However, they still contrive a way for Annie to undertake assignments right here in the US of A, despite the CIA’s mission statement to the contrary: she works for a made-up section called the “Domestic Protection Division” which operates on American soil and is so top secret we’re not meant to have heard of it. Oh well. For the sake of the show, I’ll buy it. And I don’t think we’ve had a regularly Washington-set spy series since Scarecrow and Mrs. King (excepting, perhaps, the extremely short-lived 1991 series Under Cover), so it’s still pretty original.

Perhaps owing to the current incarnation of 007 himself, the same trendsetter who made gadgets ubiquitous in all spy series for decades, there are no gadgets present in Covert Affairs’ pilot (and no Q or Marshall character), but Annie’s blessed with Jason Bourne’s talent for improvising, and using everyday objects to her advantage. She uses her compact against the sniper, and it’s not the kind of compact that doubles as a transmitter or anything. She also uses a Listerine breath strip to trick a thumbprint reader, and then sticks it in her mouth, which struck me as being more gross than cool. (You know how many people must stick their germy thumbs on that thing every day? Never mind that this particular facility was a morgue!) And she even manages to find a spy use for those Louboutin platforms that are so frequently mentioned by name and focused on. (This show has all the product placement we expect of our spy entertainment: Starbucks, Opentable.com, BMW and all those brand name fashions and fragrances.) Yes, Annie’s a pretty capable gal, and she even finds a use for her language skills that were ostensibly the reason she was pulled out of training and activated early. I do wish that the linguistic “clue” she picks up on that advances the spy plot in the 3rd Act had been more clever, though. The one they use smacks of the sort of lazy writing you might be able to get away with in the middle of the second season, but not in your pilot! I’ll give it a pass, though, since it was embedded amidst so much commendable material.

Also commendable is the topical plot device of Russians carrying out assassinations of their own on foreign soil, Litvinenko-style (although like most modern spy shows, they seem to mix up the Russian intelligence services FSB and the SVD). I like that, and the pilot gives every indication that we’ll continue to see topical, ripped-from-the-headlines sorts of spy plots rather than shadowy cabals in pursuit of mystical artifacts, further differentiating this series from Alias.

As is no doubt evident, I was fully hooked from the pilot for Covert Affairs. It’s a light spy dramady that manages to separate itself from its obvious influences by the means of a fairly unique premise focusing on the CIA as a workplace. It’s a story about a somewhat naive, but capable when it counts (not to mention fashion-savvy) young woman navigating the difficult waters of a new job, and that job just happens to entail posing as a prostitute and getting shot at. And it takes its spying pretty seriously for the most part, which isn’t really that common in the light and fluffy school of espionage television. Covert Affairs is a welcome addition to an ever-growing current roster of spy shows on the verge of equaling the genre’s Sixties preponderance. USA is sure to re-run the pilot throughout the weekend, so set your DVR and give it a try if you haven’t already.