DIE HARD director going to jail
Posted by Matt Holmes
John McTiernan is going to jail. The director who brought us DIE HARD and PREDATOR, has found himself sentenced to four months in prison for lying to the FBI about hiring a private eye to illegally wiretap producer Charles Roven.
Variety say that McTiernan pissed off the judge on Monday when he suggested that his crime didn’t deserve prison time. Some reports over the web say that he had plans to shoot a ‘patriotic movie’ and believed that to be a just cause to avoid being locked up.
The judge, quite rightly, wasn’t having it…
“He (McTiernan) will certainly not be the only depressed man in custody,” Fischer said during the Monday court hearing. “He has shown no remorse, just excuses.”
The sentence also included a $100,000 fine. McTiernan and Roven had worked together on the movie ROLLERBALL in 2002 but it’s said to be the summer of 2000 when the director paid a private eye to wiretap his producer.
McTiernan clearly didn’t expect to go to jail. He has spent 2007 lining himself up projects left and right. He had a fast paced chase movie with Karl Urban titled RUN and a Las Vegas thriller titled HIGH STAKES on the horizon along with the U.S. soldier travels to Iraq movie THE CAMEL WARS (which was no doubt the patriotic film he was talking about) and the FBI movie DEADLY EXCHANGE.
It’s not known how his jail time will effect whether any of these projects ever get made, but we do know that McTiernan has until mid-January to turn himself in, so none of these are likely to be made until next summer at the earliest.
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This is really sad for me. I know it sounds stupid, but I mean it. John McTiernan is an extraordinary director, the progenitor of “the thinking man’s action film.”
For him to have to go to jail would be a terrible blow to his career -as if getting caught illegally wiretapping folks wasn’t bad enough -especially in a town where EVERYONE has filthy secrets and wants them kept quiet!
He’s really a good guy, though he did a terrible thing, and it’s a shame he got involved doing this crap, but the way the movie industry is right now with the strike looming, by the time he gets out the industry will be more stable, since the strike issue will surely be resolved by then. I’ll be first in line to see whatever he does next.