Bradley Cooper To Wrangle Ghost Army

Producing the World War II caper

Bradley Cooper To Wrangle Ghost Army

by Owen Williams |
Published on

Clearly enjoying the producer's hat he recently donned for Hyperion, Bradley Cooper is now also putting together a WWII project at Warner Bros. He's developing, along with regular honcho Todd Phillips and American Sniper's Andrew Lazar, the WWII tall tale **Ghost Army.

Henry Gayden (Earth To Echo) has been tasked with the screenplay, adapting Rick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles' recently-published history The Ghost Army Of World War II: How One Top-Secret Unit Deceived The Enemy With Inflatable Tanks, Sound Effects, And Other Audacious Fakery. Beyer already used the material in a 2013 documentary, also called Ghost Army.

That extended title probably tells you all to need to know about the film in the offing. The stranger-than-fiction story involves a secret squad made up of artists, designers, advertising execs and other creative types who were tasked with making the US army look a lot bigger than it was, and in a lot more places than it was, in order to fool the Nazis. This really did involve inflatable tanks, as well as dummies on the ground and fake radio operatives cluttering the airwaves with disinformation. These antics have been credited with saving thousands of lives.

As with Hyperion, it isn't yet clear whether Cooper also intends to appear in front of the camera. But if we were betting people we'd put a few quid on him being part of this one's ensemble cast. There's no start date yet, while Gayden gets on with the script.

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