Warner Bros. has rekindled "Young Men and Fire" by setting Tod C. Williams to direct the film reports Variety. His cousin, Tod H. Williams, is adapting the Norman Maclean book with the studio eyeing a spring 2006 start date in Montana.
Warners has tried for more than a decade to make a movie out of a book written by the "A River Runs Through It" author just before he died. The book is about a 1949 Montana forest fire that, stoked by a rare combination of winds and explosions, produced flames the equivalent of 40 stories tall that moved 50 mph. Battling it was a group of smoke jumpers who parachuted into the conflagration. A total of 13 men died in the blaze.
"There were a pile of previous scripts, but they all seemed to deal with guilt and blame about the event, who was responsible," said the director. "We started from scratch, looking at them as young men who'd missed the war, and some of whom were conscientious objectors, a hard stance to justify in WWII. We saw them as real action heroes in a war movie with no enemy except the elements."
Thanks to 'Cliff'.
