I've been looking forward to the reviews of "Made in America" which opens Friday, starring Tom Cruise as real life cartel pilot Barry Seal. Most reviews says it's fun, typical Cruise, light-hearted and bears little resemblance to the real life events surrounding Seal. The director says they didn't want to do a biopic.

In real life: Barry Seal was gunned down in a parking lot outside the Salvation Army half-way house in Louisiana he'd been ordered to stay at during his probation in a federal case, when a car drove up with two men and shot and killed him. The U.S. insists it was a cartel hit. Others say it was ordered by the CIA. The truth will probably never be known.

The director of the movie is the son of the lawyer who was chief counsel for the Senate in the Iran Contra investigation. In an interview, the director acknowledges that He says he ordered the screenwriter to change a part of the script about Seal, drugs and the CIA, because his father maintained there was no such connection. connection.

There were things in the original script that contradicted my father's work. ... The screenwriter had in the original script some allegations about the CIA's actions that I checked with my father's deputies, and they said my father had actually looked into those allegations and they weren't true. They weren't in my father's reporting anywhere because my father actually found them to be so unsubstantiated that he didn't even want to bring them up to disavow them and give them that kind of credibility. ...I said we have to take it out of the script.

And the screenwriter was arguing back, and I was like, 'This is almost Shakespearean! You're asking me to put something in a movie that goes against my dead father's work.' You're never going to win that fight!

I wonder what the movie would have been like if Ron Howard hadn't bailed. He had initially signed on to the project when it was called "Mena", after the town in Arkansas where Seal flew a lot of drugs.

Here is the story of Barry Seal, according to a Louisiana state appeals court, in a 1991 opinion upholding the murder convictions of three men tried for killing him. [More...]