In the producers’ announcement, via THR, they explained how Maskelyne put together a rag‐tag “dirty dozen” of accomplices dubbed “The Magic Gang” who used illusion tricks to hide strategic targets such as the Alexandria harbour, the Suez Canal, in the process concealing 150,000 men with 1,000 guns and tanks.
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Following the life of real-life magician Jasper Maskelyne, the movie will be based on the book by David Fisher. No director is as of yet attached. They amazingly accomplished this task by creating a fake harbor to attract the bombing raids, and concealed troops using anti-aircraft searchlights and mirrors in order to blind the Nazis. According to the book, and Maskelyne himself, he was so powerful that Hitler had added him to his personal blacklist of folks who absolutely needed to be killed.
“The Maskelyne character is so different from the one that Benedict portrayed in “The Imitation Game” in that Maskelyne was very outgoing and confident”, Cooper said. For this project, Adam Selves and Adam Ackland will be representing the production company. Benedict Cumberbatch is a British man who has lovely ivory skin, piercing eyes, and the pointed ears of an elf. He wrote The Book of Eli, the 2010 Denzel Washington post-apocalyptic thriller and worked on Star Wars: Rogue One, the upcoming Star Wars standalone.
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The film will be a co-production between Storyscape, Tony Eldridge’s Lonetree Entertainment. He is adapting the Mark Millar sci-fi comic Starlight for Fox. Its projects include “FBI Wedding” at Universal with Jason Bateman starring and directing and “Stealing Time” at DreamWorks with Tim Dowling writing and Colin Trevorrow executive producing.
