Valerie Plame, who was outed as a CIA agent by officials in the George W. Bush White House in 2003, is heading to the Cannes Film Festival next month to hype “Fair Game,” in which she’s played by Naomi Watts.
The movie, directed by Doug Liman of “The Bourne Identity” and “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” fame, doesn’t have a distributor yet and was screened for moneymen on Tuesday in Hollywood for “a packed house,” Deadline Hollywood reports.
The producers are hoping to line up a distribution deal before it premieres May 20 in competition at Cannes, where the always anti-American audience is expected to give it an enthusiastic reception.
Plame, who is as blond and beautiful as Watts, was touting the movie Wednesday night at the Museum of Modern Art screening of a scary documentary about nuclear proliferation, “Countdown to Zero.”
She told one guest that Sean Penn, who plays her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, in “Fair Game,” impressed her when he “flew in on Southwest Airlines and spent three days following my husband, even wearing the same cologne.”
Plame was identified as a CIA agent after Wilson, who had gone to Africa to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellow-cake uranium, wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times claiming there was never any credible evidence of weapons of mass destruction. The movie probably won’t show that it was Plame who arranged for her then-underemployed husband to get the assignment to Africa.
After “Countdown to Zero” screened, Plame went to dinner at the Plaza Athenée with the documentary’s producer, Lawrence Bender, director Lucy Walker, Robert and Leslie Zemeckis, Jean Doumanian, Queen Noor, David Boies, Robert Walden, Laurie Dhue and Bill McCuddy.