"So, You Ever Kill Anybody?"

By Josh Tyrangiel/Los Angeles

Very few screenwriters get kidnapped. In Hollywood, where most of them live and work, they're considered low-value targets. But moments after arriving in Beirut in 2002, Stephen Gaghan, the Oscar-winning writer of Traffic, found himself in what seemed to be a hostage situation. His cell phone rang, and the voice on the other end said, "I've got something really special you can do, but you have to do it right now and I can't tell you what it is." Gaghan walked out of the airport and got into a car with a stranger. As they drove, he was stripped of his backpack, pens and belt, and was blindfolded, hooded and thrown into the back of another car. "There was a bad 10 minutes in there where I'm thinking, 'You are really an idiot,'" he says. "'You're like Mr. Magoo. You just wander over to the Middle East and, literally, within the first 20 minutes get kidnapped and beheaded. World record!'"

The abduction turned out to be standard procedure for anyone visiting Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, spiritual leader of the Lebanese Shi'ite militia Hizballah, who, unbeknownst to Gaghan, had an interest in movies and had decided to grant the screenwriter an audience--even though Gaghan hadn't requested one. Naturally, the near kidnapping found its way into Gaghan's new film Syriana, which dramatizes the politics of oil, terrorism and the Persian Gulf in much the same way Traffic spun entertainment out of addiction, drug policy and the U.S.-Mexico border. If anything, Syriana, which opens Nov. 23, is more ambitious and demanding than its predecessor. The movie has multiple narratives that are deliberately confusing. It casts an actor known for his likability, Matt Damon, as an oil trader profiting on the death of his son. It takes a star, George Clooney, known for his sex appeal and hides him behind a thick beard and a ring of flab. "It's a miracle this film got made," says Gaghan.

More miraculous is how it was made. Before agreeing to write and direct the movie, Gaghan got Warner Bros. to give him an unlimited research budget and no deadline. For a year and a half, he read books on the Middle East in his Malibu beach house and then, at his leisure, jetted off to meet people he had read about. He crossed Lebanon's Bekaa Valley on the first anniversary of 9/11, dined with men now suspected of killing former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, and sipped cappuccino in the kitchen of former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle. Being a guy from Hollywood was often all it took to get people talking. "Steve got to do some amazing things," says Clooney, who is also Syriana's executive producer. "Other screenwriters probably want to kidnap him out of jealousy."

How Gaghan, 40, got such latitude is a tribute to the virtues of failure. In his teens and 20s, he had a serious drug problem that led to more than a dozen arrests. On his way to sobriety, he became perhaps the only writer in history to be rejected by both Baywatch Nights and Red Shoe Diaries before landing a job on NYPD Blue under celebrated writer guru David Milch. But struggling for years imbued him with an uncommon sense of purpose. After winning an Oscar for Traffic in 2001, Gaghan turned down seven-figure offers to write the fourth Indiana Jones movie and adapt The Da Vinci Code. Instead, inspired by an anecdote about an oil lobbyist in See No Evil, a memoir by former CIA officer Robert Baer, Gaghan decided to make a complex, journalistic movie about the politics of crude. "It's rare in Hollywood to get the chance to work on something that you actually care about," says Gaghan. "The tragedy of the place is all these talented people trying to get excited about stuff they themselves would only view at gunpoint."

Steven Soderbergh, who directed Traffic and whose production company, Section Eight, bought the rights to See No Evil, negotiated the deal with Warner Bros., even though details about the movie were nonexistent. "In those situations," says Soderbergh, "you never expect the studio to see the UFO, but you've got to make them believe you saw it." Still, Gaghan needed a story, and See No Evil was no help. Even Baer admits that much of the book is so esoteric that it's "wasted on everyone but Israeli intelligence."

So Gaghan did what everyone in Hollywood does--lunch. Sitting across from Baer for the first time, at a Santa Monica restaurant called Pedals ("A little fey for a high-level spook meeting," says Gaghan) in 2002, he sensed that the ex-spy, who was once accused of trying to arrange the assassination of Saddam Hussein, was far better movie material than his book. As it happened, Baer, who speaks Farsi and Arabic, was a willing conduit into the culture and characters of the Middle East. "Summer was ending, and I had to take my daughter back to boarding school in Europe," says Baer, 53. "All the players in the Gulf spend August in the south of France, so I told Gaghan, 'Come along. We'll see some arms dealers, some people from Fatah intelligence, some oil traders.' I wasn't a consultant on the film. This was just a road trip. The terrorism-arms-dealer-oil-trader tour!"

Gaghan, Baer and Baer's then 13-year-old daughter Charlotte met up in Nice. Within a few hours, they were relaxing on the yacht of a former Fatah intelligence officer. Then a representative of the Carlyle Group, the global investment behemoth, anchored next to them. "It kept getting crazier and crazier," says Baer. "You could see Gaghan beginning to frame a picture." Part of the insanity was the disconnect between Baer and his old associates. "I'm an ex-bureaucrat," says Baer. "I have no money. I got a $70,000 advance for my book--which in their world is a three-day trip to New York. I think Gaghan saw the tension there."

After 10 days, the trio piled into a Renault 25 and set off for Venice. In a hotel restaurant on the road, with Charlotte upstairs watching MTV, Gaghan felt comfortable enough to ask, "So, you ever kill anybody?" Baer said, "I've made decisions that resulted in people's deaths, maybe hundreds of people's deaths, but I never lost a night's sleep. Never. Because I had 500 pages of U.S. law to hide behind." Gaghan's initial thought was that he had been fed a line--and a bad one. Gradually, though, he realized Baer's candor with a flourish was not affectation but a kind of verbal rosary. Baer had done some bad things, and he needed to reassure himself and others that he had done them for a good cause. "When I started this whole process, I ran across this Victor Hugo quote. 'Exile is not a material thing, it is a spiritual thing,'" says Gaghan. "And what ever happened to Bob inside the CIA, he felt to me like an exile."

When they got to Geneva, Gaghan learned that "all the business of the Middle East is conducted in hotel lobbies." Schmoozing with oil traders and arms dealers at the Hotel Intercontinental, he spotted former Saudi Oil Minister Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, still one of the world's most powerful people, and sent him a note requesting an interview, revealing what Gaghan calls the "pathetic ineptitude of my methodology."

Yamani never called, but he was in the minority. Gaghan was stunned by how eager people were to chat with him. "You're on the boat of the head of military intelligence for a North African nation. This man is worldly. And when the conversation turns to me, it's, 'Do you know Leonardo DiCaprio?'" Besides being fascinated by fame and flattered by Gaghan's interest in the Middle East, most believed themselves experts on the movie business; they pitied Gaghan because, as everyone knows, so few scripts ever get filmed. "That mix of interest and condescension was really useful. 'Such a shame you'll never get your movie made.' 'Yep, now tell me how you armed Saddam in the '80s ...'"

Gaghan developed his own connections ("It's exactly like backpacking from hostel to hostel," he says of navigating the social byways of the oil industry) and traveled alone to Beirut. There he was abducted by Hizballah and rewarded with such colorful Fadlallah quotes as "People moved to terrorism are like the people in a school or post office who are pressured, feeling there is no alternative" and "You can go to www .fadlallah org. Gaghan knew by then that an Arabist ex-- CIA agent would be a major character in the aborning film. But as in Traffic, he wanted multiple points of view, so he logged more miles--he guesses his expenses approached $70,000--and did similarly intensive research stints with oil traders in London and lawyers in Washington. Through a journalist friend, he arranged a meeting with Perle a few months before the invasion of Iraq. Over what Gaghan calls "the best cappuccino of my life," they bantered in Perle's palatial kitchen until Gaghan, at that point quite knowledgeable about the Middle East, questioned the viability of Perle's friend Ahmad Chalabi as a future Iraqi leader. "[Perle] steepled his hands just like Mr. Burns on The Simpsons and stared at me. Then the doorbell rang--beat ... beat ... beat--'Excellent. I'll introduce you to Bibi on the way out.'" (Neither Perle nor former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned calls for comment.)

In the final film, the plot, rather, plots are wholly invented and the names have been changed. Clooney's character is called Bob Barnes, although his expertise and undercurrent of melancholy are pure Baer. (Barnes' prodigiously sarcastic son Robby is modeled on Charlotte Baer.) But the fruits of Gaghan's research are obvious. Syriana's characters--from would-be Arab princes to American oil traders, CIA agents to terrorists--behave in exquisitely detailed and complicated ways. They cross paths and challenge one another's assumptions, just as Gaghan's were challenged. Of course, Syriana is entertainment first and foremost. It just happens to feel true.