What Soderbergh’s U.N.C.L.E. would have been like

The Man From U.N.C.L.E.: still dormant.

Scott Z. Burns, who wrote a script for director Steven Soderbergh for a movie version of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in 2011, has told COLLIDER.COM some details about the aborted project, which would have been set in the 1960s.

An excerpt:

Burns: Yeah, Steven and I both loved it because (U.N.C.L.E.) was a way of doing a spy movie and setting up a really interesting character that was fascinating to us, because U.N.C.L.E. wasn’t affiliated with the US or with Russia, it was this great cold war thing. And now spies have all these great toys but we would have to take some of them away, because it was the 60’s and there would be different plots because you didn’t always have a cell and you couldn’t solve problems with some of the things now.

So we had this idea based on something happening in the real world…there was a thing that happened with a B-52 bomber in like 1966 or 1967 over Spain where it was refueling and there was an accident and it lost its payload and three bombs fell on Spain and the Atlantic, and they hadn’t been armed, but …contained warheads.

So we scattered plutonium all over a farm field in Spain, the second bomb was recovered, but the there was a period of time when the third bomb was laying on the floor of the Mediterranean and no one could find it and so it was the race to find it that was what our episode was about, which I thought was going to be really, really cool and I’m bummed we didn’t get to do it.

Burns also told Collider that the project “was pretty close to going. I think we were all shocked that it didn’t happen.” Instead, Soderbergh quit the project.

This came out because Soderbergh, 50, wants to retire from directing. After U.N.C.L.E. crashed, he and Burns did a medical thriller called Side Effects, which comes out Feb. 8. Thus, publicity for Side Effects is underway.

Soderbergh’s last directing project, is a made-for-HBO movie about Liberace. Meanwhile, there have been no signs that Warner Bros., which has the rights to the 1964-68 U.N.C.L.E. television series, is doing anything with the property soon.