Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning documentarian behind Taxi to the Dark Side, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer and The Armstrong Lie, will make his narrative feature directing debut with Action, a political thriller set in the 1970s.
According to Deadline, Gibney’s film will centre on eight antiwar activists intent on exposing the systematic surveillance and blackmail of those who crossed J Edgar Hoover, the first director of the FBI.
The film will reportedly be based on the true story of the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. The leftist activists broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania and stole up to 1,000 classified documents on 8 March 1971, the day of Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali’s “fight of the century” . It’s thought that 40% of the files, part of an operation called Cointelpro, detailed actions targeted at political groups against which Hoover held a vendetta. The papers revealed that mail workers and switchboard operators were being used to monitor antiwar groups and civil rights activists.
Although 200 FBI agents were assigned to investigate the burglary, the culprits weren’t caught before the five-year statute of limitations had expired. In 2014, three people – John Raines, his wife, Bonnie, and Keith Forsyth – admitted they had been part of the gang. Their story was told in Betty Medsger’s book The Burglary: The Discovery of J Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI.
Gibney, a prolific documentary film-maker, has been involved with multiple projects related to freedom of speech and invasion of privacy by the state. He has made films about WikiLeaks (We Steal Secrets, 2013) and the US military’s use of torture (Taxi to the Dark Side, 2008). His 2016 film, Zero Days, investigates the use of computer viruses in cyber warfare.
