With the respected directors making their way to television, the medium is now luring Michael Mann back into its warming embrace. The Heat director, who cut his teeth on TV shows like Starsky and Hutch, Police Story, and Miami Vice, has, along with producer Michael De Luca, snapped up the rights to Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden’s Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam.
Deadline reports that Mann and De Luca will shape Bowden’s book into an an eight-to ten-hour miniseries event, with Mann directing “numerous episodes.” Hue 1968 focuses on the Tet Offensive that became a major turning point of American involvement in the Vietnam War, and one can see the Amazon synopsis below.
By January 1968, despite an influx of half a million American troops, the fighting in Vietnam seemed to be at a stalemate. Yet General William Westmoreland, commander of American forces, announced a new phase of the war in which “the end begins to come into view.” The North Vietnamese had different ideas. In mid-1967, the leadership in Hanoi had started planning an offensive intended to win the war in a single stroke. Part military action and part popular uprising, the Tet Offensive included attacks across South Vietnam, but the most dramatic and successful would be the capture of Hue, the country’s cultural capital. At 2:30 a.m. on January 31, 10,000 National Liberation Front troops descended from hidden camps and surged across the city of 140,000. By morning, all of Hue was in Front hands save for two small military outposts.
The commanders in country and politicians in Washington refused to believe the size and scope of the Front’s presence. Captain Chuck Meadows was ordered to lead his 160-marine Golf Company against thousands of enemy troops in the first attempt to re-enter Hue later that day. After several futile and deadly days, Lieutenant Colonel Ernie Cheatham would finally come up with a strategy to retake the city, block by block and building by building, in some of the most intense urban combat since World War II.
Deadline quotes Mann as saying Bowden’s book is a “masterpiece of intensely dramatic nonfiction,” adding “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 Huế1968 rises to the emotional power and universality of For Whom The Bell Tolls and All Quiet On The Western Front.”
In related news, Mann’s crime classic Heat returns to theaters for one night only, May 2, to commemorate a definitive director’s cut Blu-ray which will be released on May 9. No word on a definitive Blackhat Blu-ray, though. There’s also no word yet if this news will cause a delay on his Hugh Jackman-led biopic Ferrari.