New 'Hurt Locker' Lawsuit Claims Sergeant Served as Film's Uncompensated Inspiration

Timing... is everything...

By: Brad Brevet
Published: Wednesday, March 3rd 2010 at 4:49 PM

The timing surrounding the now notorious emails of The Hurt Locker producer Nicolas Chartier were obviously in an effort to instigate an eleventh hour smear campaign against the current Best Picture front-runner. Whether you think the penalty against Chartier was too much or too little is besides the point, this stuff goes on all the time and he just happened to get called out and with the advent of the Internet the mouthpiece to disseminate such information was simply on a much grander level. However, the timing on this newest development is just as intriguing.

Today it was reported that Master Sgt. Jeffrey S. Sarver is filing a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the makers of The Hurt Locker saying the character portrayed by Jeremy Renner — "Will James" or "Blaster One" [which was Master Sgt. Sarver's "call signal" during his tours of duty in Iraq] — is in fact Sarver. The charge comes as a result of a piece screenwriter Mark Boal did for Playboy titled "The Man in the Bomb Suit" after Boal, was allowed, as part of an armed services press program, to be embedded in Master Sgt. Sarver's unit.

The Fieger Law Offices are representing Sarver and allege virtually all of the situations portrayed in the film were, in fact, occurrences involving Master Sgt. Sarver that were observed and documented by Screenwriter Boal. The suit also contends Master Sgt. Sarver coined the phrase, "The Hurt Locker" for Boal and that the film's makers falsely claim that the characters portrayed in the film are fictional when, in fact, the film's main character "Will James," is Master Sgt. Sarver.

Summit has issued a statement saying, "We have no doubt that Master Sergeant Sarver served his country with honor and commitment risking his life for a greater good, but we distributed the film based on a fictional screenplay written by Mark Boal."

The reason I mention timing at the outset, is because Fieger admits he timed the lawsuit so it wouldn't interfere with voting for the Academy Awards, which ended Tuesday night.

The lawsuit names several defendants, including Boal and the film's director, Kathryn Bigelow, who Fieger claims consulted with Boal while he was embedded.

I interviewed Kathryn Bigelow back in June of last year and she told me, "Mark comes back and has these incredible stories and these amazing characters. We fused some and then fictionalized because ultimately it's meant to be a movie and not a documentary, but at the same time we wanted to keep it extremely, almost hyper-reportorial. So it feels very much like an immersive, boots-on-the-ground, you-are-there, look-at-that conflict."

Jody Simon, an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, was quoted by WRAL regarding the matter and said, "Soldiers don't have privacy. The military embedded [Boal] so they gave the reporter permission to observe what was going on. … Works of fiction always have elements of fact."

I have no idea what will come of this, but it does strike me as interesting that the United States military would not cooperate with the production, but only a week ago an article at the Los Angeles Times had soldiers and army veterans saying the film "doesn't depict combat accurately." Here's a snippet:

Sgt. Eric Gordon of San Pedro, an Air Force EOD technician on his second tour in Iraq, has watched the movie a few times with his friends. "I would watch it with other EOD people, and we would laugh," Gordon said.

He scoffed at a scene in which a bomb is defused with wire cutters. "It's similar to having a firefighter go into a building with a squirt bottle," Gordon said.

An EOD team leader in Maysan province, Staff Sgt. Jeremy D. Phillips, said, "My interest is bringing myself and my team members home alive, with all of our appendages in the right place."

Although he was glad the film highlighted their trade, he disliked the celluloid treatment of EOD units. "There is too much John Wayne and cowboy stuff. It is very loosely based on actual events," he said. "I'm honestly glad they are trying to convey to the public what we've been doing, and I wish maybe they had just done it with a little bit of a different spin on it," he said.

That was yet another one of the smear campaigns against The Hurt Locker that Movieline's S.T. VanAirsdale believes the "Los Angeles Times" has shown a curious interest in.

Perhaps Master Sgt. Sarver deserves a cut, I have no idea, but The Hurt Locker was first screened at the Venice Film Festival on September 4, 2008, almost a year-and-a-half ago, and all of a sudden the negativity gets turned up to eleven?

Timing is everything folks.

You can read Boal's original Playboy piece right here if you are interested.