Alex Gibney, the man who brought us such well-regarded documentaries as Going Clear: Scientology And The Prison Of Belief, Taxi To The Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, is now aiming to try his hand at a political thriller called The Action.
The '70s-set film, which has Scott Z. Burns writing the script, will follow eight anti-war activists who, on the night of that Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier in 1971, broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania and stole files pertaining to the bureau's surveillance of their operations and other civil rights groups. It ended up shedding light on J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to wiretap and blackmail potential troublemakers.
Though the bureau launched a huge investigation, the culprits went unknown for decades, and unmasked themselves voluntarily to Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger (the woman to whom they'd sent the files originally) in 2014, and she wrote a book on the case, The Burglary: The Discovery Of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI.
This sounds like something Gibney could really get his teeth into, and it'll be interesting to see how his years of experience making urgent, fascinating documentaries translates into a thriller.