Mark Boal

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Mark Boal

Mark Boal (* 1973 in New York City , New York ) is an American journalist , Oscar- winning screenwriter and film producer .

Life

Mark Boal grew up in New York and studied philosophy at Oberlin College . After graduating in 1995, he turned to work as a journalist. Boal completed his training at the New York weekly newspaper The Village Voice , where he was to be entrusted with a weekly column under the title The Monitor at the age of 25 . At The Village Voice , he published a series of articles on youth culture topics such as the television series Survivor ( The Million-Dollar Castaway , 1999) or the computer game The Sims ( Me And My Sims , 2000) until 2000, but also touched on sensitive topics such as federal internet censorship ( FBI's Shutter Speed , Machine Age, November 3, 1999). In his following articles he also took on politics, crime and drug culture, which appeared in the music magazine Rolling Stone , the left-wing magazine Mother Jones , The New York Observer or the men's magazine Playboy , for which Boal mainly wrote. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, which he witnessed in his hometown of New York, the journalist began to be interested in questions of national security and the Iraq war .

Some of Boal's reports have been successfully adapted for US television and cinema. Jailbait , an article about a covert drug investigators found for the police series The Inside of the TV channel Fox use. A series project on the same subject, announced in 2003 and directed by Kathryn Bigelow , was never realized. Boal's article Death and Dishonor , published in Playboy that same year, served as the basis for Paul Haggis ' film In the Valley of Elah (2007), in which a war veteran tries to solve the disappearance of his son who has returned from Iraq. The role of Hank Deerfield earned leading actor Tommy Lee Jones an Oscar nomination in 2008 .

Boal's greatest success to date was his script for Kathryn Bigelow's war drama Deadly Command - The Hurt Locker (2009). At the end of 2004, the journalist himself accompanied a unit to the theater of war in Baghdad for several weeks for the episodic story of an American bomb clearance squad in Iraq . Boal, a self-declared admirer of works like Truman Capote's Cold Blood or Gustav Hasford's Hellfire , wanted his script to be as realistic as possible and offered the script to Kathryn Bigelow. This was followed by a close collaboration with the film director, who also took Boal to the shooting of the film and suggested that he work as a producer on The Hurt Locker .

The film was enthusiastically received by US critics, who rated Tödliches Kommando - The Hurt Locker as the near-perfect and best non-documentary American feature film about the Iraq war to date. In 2010, the war drama was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Boal for his script and as a co-producer. He had previously received the British BAFTA Award and the prestigious Writer's Guild of America Award . Boal won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.

A few days before the Oscars , the American soldier Jeffrey Sarver filed a lawsuit against the film. Boal would have used Sarver's view in the script and the role of Staff Sergeant William James (played by Jeremy Renner ) based on him. The lawsuit was dismissed by a Los Angeles magistrate in mid-October 2011 after Boal assured him that the script was inspired by numerous conversations with soldiers during his time in Iraq.

After Tödliches Kommando - The Hurt Locker, she worked again with Kathryn Bigelow on the feature film Zero Dark Thirty (2012). The thriller, which focuses on a young CIA analyst (played by Jessica Chastain ) on the hunt for Osama bin Laden , opened in US theaters on December 19, 2012 and won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for award for best film of the year .

Filmography

Awards

Oscar

  • 2010 : Best Film and Best Original Screenplay for Deadly Command - The Hurt Locker

British Academy Film Award

  • 2010 : Best Film and Best Original Screenplay for Deadly Command - The Hurt Locker

Golden Globe Award

  • 2010 : Nominated for Best Screenplay for Deadly Command - The Hurt Locker

Further

Broadcast Film Critics Association

  • 2010: Nominated for Best Original Screenplay for Deadly Command - The Hurt Locker

Chicago Film Critics Association

  • 2009: Best Original Screenplay for Deadly Command - The Hurt Locker

Chlotrudis Awards

  • 2010: Nominated for Best Original Screenplay for Deadly Command - The Hurt Locker

Gotham Award

  • 2009: Best Film for Deadly Command - The Hurt Locker

Cannes International Film Festival

Nantucket Film Festival

  • 2009: Tony Cox Award for Screenwriting for Deadly Command - The Hurt Locker

Online Film Critics Society Awards

  • 2010: Nominated for Best Original Screenplay for Deadly Command - The Hurt Locker

Producers Guild of America

  • 2010: Best Film Producer of the Year for Deadly Command - The Hurt Locker

Satellite Awards

  • 2009: Nominated in the Best Original Screenplay category for Deadly Command - The Hurt Locker

Washington DC Area Film Critics Association Awards

  • 2009: Nominated in the Best Original Screenplay category for Deadly Command - The Hurt Locker

Writers Guild of America

  • 2010: Best Original Screenplay for Deadly Command - The Hurt Locker

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Best from blogs . In: Crain's Cleveland Business, August 3, 2009, p. 19
  2. ↑ cf. Johnston, Sheila: The Hurt Locker: interview with Mark Boal on telegraph.co.uk, August 25, 2009 (accessed March 6, 2010)
  3. ↑ cf. Andreeva, Nellie: Fox, Bigelow back to school for drama pilot . In: The Hollywood Reporter, September 26, 2003 (accessed March 6, 2010 via LexisNexis Wirtschaft )
  4. ↑ cf. Ebiri, Bilge: Hurt Locker Screenwriter Mark Boal on How His Script Was Inspired by a 'News Black Hole' at nymag.com, December 21, 2009 (accessed March 6, 2010)
  5. ↑ cf. Lodge, Guy: Interview: Mark Boal at incontention.com, September 9, 2009 (accessed March 6, 2010)
  6. ↑ cf. Scott, AO: Soldiers on a Live Wire Between Peril and Protocol . In: The New York Times , June 26, 2009, Section C, p. 1
  7. ↑ cf. Corliss, Richard: The Hurt Locker: A Near-Perfect War Film at time.com, September 4, 2008 (accessed March 6, 2010)
  8. ↑ cf. Bone, James; Coghlan, Tom: Explosive film lacks verité, say veterans . In: The Times , March 5, 2010, p. 46
  9. ↑ Barnes, Brooks: Judge Dismisses Suit Over 'The Hurt Locker' . In: The New York Times , October 15, 2011, p. C2.
  10. ↑ contessanally.blogspot.de: Marc Boal wins Gucci Group Award (accessed October 29, 2014)
personal data
SURNAME Boal, Mark
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH 1973
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City , New York, United States