SNL Creator Lorne Michaels is Producing a Film Based on The Navy SEAL Who Killed Osama bin Laden

Lorne Michaels is best known for creating and producing the comedy sketch series Saturday Night Live. He has also produced several films and TV shows, most of which deal with comedy. But his next project is something very different. It doesn’t sound like it’s going to be very funny at all. But, it does sound like it’s going to be good!

Michaels will be producing a film with Universal Pictures that will tell the story of Navy SEAL Rob O’Neill, the man who killed Osama bin Laden. The movie will be based on the biography he wrote called The Operator, which is a memoir of O’Neill’s life and service, but it specifically recounts the experience of killing the terrorist leader.

Here’s the official synopsis for the book:

This instant New York Times bestseller—“a jaw-dropping, fast-paced account” (New York Post) recounts SEAL Team Operator Robert O’Neill’s incredible four-hundred-mission career, including the attempts to rescue “Lone Survivor” Marcus Luttrell and abducted-by-Somali-pirates Captain Richard Phillips, and which culminated in the death of the world’s most wanted terrorist—Osama bin Laden.

In The Operator, Robert O’Neill describes his idyllic childhood in Butte, Montana; his impulsive decision to join the SEALs; the arduous evaluation and training process; and the even tougher gauntlet he had to run to join the SEALs’ most elite unit. After officially becoming a SEAL, O’Neill would spend more than a decade in the most intense counterterror effort in US history. For extended periods, not a night passed without him and his small team recording multiple enemy kills—and though he was lucky enough to survive, several of the SEALs he’d trained with and fought beside never made it home.

This seriously has the makings of a great film. I like these kinds of movies and this book is being adapted by Michael Russell Gunn, who worked on the Showtime series Billions. The Operator will be one of his first feature film projects. He’s also working on a film called Breaking Cover, which tells the true story of posthumous Medal of Honor recipient John Chapman, the first man to receive the award since Vietnam.

Source: Deadline