Premium cable network to adapt Vietnam War book into limited series.
FX has landed the rights to turn Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden’s book Huế, 1968 into a limited event series that will range from eight-10 hours.
Michael Mann and Michael De Luca acquired the rights to the book in late April.
The Vietnam War adaption will focus on lives on all sides during pivotal the Tet Offensive by Vietnamese forces. Characters include a seemingly innocent Vietnamese schoolgirl turned hardened revolutionary; a Marine captain from Pennsylvania who becomes a war hero; a Hanoi teacher who fights as an infantryman for the North Vietnamese army; and US president Lyndon B. Johnson.
Mann, the Oscar-winning director of Collateral, The Insider, and Heat, plans to direct several episodes and will produce alongside De Luca and FX Productions.
The network is reportedly planning to begin filming on the series at the end of this year in Asia.
When Screen first reported on the acquisition of the material by Mann and De Luca, Mann said: “Mark Bowden’s written a masterpiece of intensely dramatic non-fiction. Bowden’s achievement is in making ‘them’ into ‘us’. We are them. There are no background people; people abstracted into statistics, body counts. There is the sense that everybody is somebody, as each is in the reality of his or her own life.
“The brilliance of Bowden’s narrative, the achievement of interviewing hundreds of people on all sides and making their human stories his foundation, is why Huế, 1968 rises to the emotional power and universality of For Whom The Bell Tolls and All Quiet On The Western Front.”
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