With American Sniper and Aloha, Bradley Cooper is on an Army movie run, which he will now cap off by making a movie about a fake Army. He’s going to play a guy pretending to be in the Army, pretending to be in the Army—kind of. Based on the true story of a prototype psy-ops warfare unit in World War II, BCoop is producing a film about the “Ghost Army”, a squadron of recruits from various creative jobs like advertising and fashion design (Bill Blass was among them) who went around Europe with records of sound effects and inflatable tanks and tricked the Nazis into thinking the US had forces where there were none. The movie will be adapted from the book The Ghost Army Of World War II: How One Top-Secret Unit Deceived The Enemy with Inflatable Tanks, Sound Effects, And Other Audacious Fakery. There’s also a documentary you can check out on Amazon Prime.
It’s a wild story, the kind of thing that is so out there it just sounds like the plot of a movie. So it ought to make a pretty good movie, because the elements are already in place. It also kind of gives me Top Secret! vibes. Remember that movie, the Val Kilmer spy spoof? When I saw the Ghost Army documentary I actually thought of Top Secret! because it seemed like the kind of balls-out crazy mission Nick Rivers would go on. Like, hey guys, take a bunch of inflatable tanks and cutouts of cars and play some machine gun sounds and trick the Nazis into thinking we have three thousand men waiting to invade this valley. Seriously? Yeah, seriously! They’ll totally fall for it! AND THEY DID. That Ghost Army sh*t worked. So yeah, this project has a lot of potential, especially if BCoop ends up starring in it, because I have missed his comedy chops the last couple years.
