HBO Plans Iran Hostage Drama

Exactly 30 years to the day that a group of militant students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and began a 444-day hostage crisis that doomed the administration of president Jimmy Carter, HBO Films has made a deal to turn the ordeal into a film.

HBO has acquired “Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis, The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam,” the book by “Black Hawk Down” author Mark Bowden.

Andrea Berloff, who scripted the Oliver Stone-directed “World Trade Center,” will adapt.

William Horberg will be executive producer.

Some 66 Americans were taken hostage on November 4, 1979 and weren’t freed until January, 1981. An event that began as an expression of student outrage over the U.S. decision to allow the ousted Shah of Iran into the country for medical treatment fueled the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and his hard-line cronies.

A rescue attempt ended disastrously, and the prolonged stalemate haunted the administration of President Jimmy Carter. As much as the crisis fueled a rise in fundamentalist Islam in Iran, it boosted the rise of the Conservative Republican Ronald Reagan, who defeated Carter in the election, promptly unfroze $8 billion in Iranian assets and took the bows when the hostages were freed. 

The Bowden book was first optioned in 2003 by Paramount for producer Scott Rudin, with the studio making a seven-figure commitment when Bowden had only written a two-page proposal.

Horberg, a producer of “The Kite Runner,” was the catalyst for the project’s resurgence.

“I was able to visit Tehran as part of the Academy delegation’s international outreach committed,” Horberg said. “I spent ten days there, screening films and meeting Iranian filmmakers. A couple of weeks after I was back and lunching with ICM agent Ron Bernstein and telling him about the trip, he said the rights to the Bowden book were free and clear. Mark writes these historically significant books that read like page-turners, and this 700-page yarn grips you from the moment those students climb over the gates. It is one of the most important defining political events of the last 40 years, the introduction of radical Islam to most people, and HBO seemed the only place to tackle this kind of epic political subject matter. And it’s still relevant.”