Hollywood has its own intrigues that rival international espionage, as this writer learned while pulling a thread left in yesterday’s comments by author JD Cowan.
[Director John] McTiernan’s career is fascinating. Everything he did was fantastic until the 2000s hit and he got entangled with the feds after his producers sabotaged Rollerball for him. They really bled him dry. That and getting involved with the production disaster known as Basic really stalled his career.
It’s a shame such a talent was squandered like that. He truly was one of the best and should have done much more.
When asked for more details, JD said,
It’s difficult to get any real information about what happened, but it was apparently so bad that McTiernan hired a PI to look into them and even tap their phones. If that is even what really happened, it’s hard to say. He was allegedly charged because he lied to a fed about wiretapping in the first place but pled guilty because he was told they’d be more lenient on him. So whether anything actually occurred in the first place is hard to determine. Nonetheless, they bled him dry in the courts for nearly a decade afterwards. He’s been released for nearly 9 years now, even after writing a Thomas Crown sequel in prison, but who knows if he’ll ever be able to work again?
It’s a crazy story, mostly because it’s still unclear what actually happened and he only suffered penalty in the first place due to allegedly lying to the feds.
Apparently he’s working on a movie called Tau Ceti Foxtrot right now, so I suppose we’ll see how that goes. Hopefully well.
These hints of mystery spun from a beef between a beloved High 80s director and his producer, which involved the feds and a shady PI, grabbed me as only the best plot hooks can. So I did some digging.
JD was right. Details on the McTiernan case are hard to come by. Here’s the best summary I could find:
In a criminal-wiretapping case filed by the U.S. District Attorney for Los Angeles, John McTiernan plead guilty to lying to F.B.I. agents about requesting to have Anthony Pellicano investigate producer Charles Roven during production of Rollerball (2002). Sentenced to four months in federal prison on 09/24/07, plea was withdrawn and restated as innocent since statement had been given to FBI when McTiernan was admittedly suffering jet-lag and drunk after arriving in US from UK trip. Case was tried and US conviction was handed down on 10/4/2010 by US District Judge Dale Fischer with one-year sentence and $100,000 USD fine against McTiernan. McTiernan’s attorneys announced intent to appeal and he is currently free on appeal.
The more threads of this tangled web I pulled, the more they kept leading back to McTiernan’s hired investigator Anthony Pellicano. Digging into this guy didn’t send me down a rabbit hole. It led into the Mammoth Cave of Tinseltown trickery.
An infamous Hollywood fixer who specialized in unofficial extractions of top talent from sticky situations, Pellicano’s skills failed to extricate him from his own run-in with the law.
On February 4, 2006, Pellicano was formally arrested on additional charges. On February 6, 2006, in United States District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles, Pellicano was indicted on 110 counts. His alleged crimes included racketeering, conspiracy, wiretapping, witness tampering, identity theft and destruction of evidence. Specifically, Pellicano was charged with receiving unlawfully accessed confidential records on celebrities and public figures from members of the Los Angeles and Beverly Hills police departments. For example, prosecutors alleged that Pellicano tapped the phones of Sylvester Stallone and Keith Carradine and accessed the confidential police records of Garry Shandling and Kevin Nealon.
And of course, we know how associating with Pellicano turned out for McTiernan.
On April 3, 2006, film director John McTiernan was charged with lying to the FBI about his relationship with Pellicano. On April 17, 2006, McTiernan pleaded guilty to the charge. On September 24, 2007, he was sentenced to four months in prison. The sentence was later increased to twelve months, and ultimately he was incarcerated in federal prison from April 2013 to February 2014
Look, I get it. Sometimes high-profile people need low-profile solutions to delicate problems. There’s nothing wrong with handling certain matters privately per se.
That said, Hollywood a weird place that may be even darker than most cynics think. Anyone delving into the lions’ den is well-advised to choose his friends with care.
For a less depressing, fictional tale of Faustian bargains that bite their signatories on the ass, read my acclaimed horror-adventure novel:
The only thing John McTiernan has directed in almost 20 years was a live action Ubisoft Ghost Recon Wildlands trailer. If nothing else it shows that he’s definitely still got the stuff.