American journalist Sergei Loiko has refused to sell Hollywood film studios the movie rights for his coverage of the defense of the ruined Donetsk Airport, in which Russian-separatist forces defeated Ukrainian soldiers after a long siege a year ago.
Loiko has been covering Russia’s war against Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region for the Los Angeles Times. He turned his stories into a book “Airport.” It was released in Ukraine in September and became a bestseller. The English translation is coming later this year.
According to Loiko, Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures offered $157,500 for the right to use the characters and situations from his stories in a movie. The author was offered to be a movie consultant, with no control over the storyline. Loiko was afraid the story would be distorted so he turned down the offer.
“I don’t want some guy from Santa Monica with a glass of Californian wine to turn the story about the bravery of Ukrainian soldiers who died in the airport into an average action film,” Loiko said on Facebook.
The scan of an author’s agreement offered to Loiko by Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Sergei Loiko published on his Facebook page on Jan 22.
Loiko said that the financial offer was good, but concerns about the storyline outweighed the money.
“The money will run off and the shame will rest forever if film studios make a nonsense movie under my name,” he said. “Some people will call me an idiot and they might be right.”
The protagonists of the “Airport” are the so-called “cyborgs,” Ukrainian soldiers who held the airport for over six months against the Russian-separatist forces and earned the name for their fantastic resilience.
Pro-Russian rebels sappers walk toward the destroyed Donetsk international airport on October 13, 2015. Ukrainian forces lost control of the airport in January 2015.(AFP)
“It is a book about a war that wasn’t supposed to happen. And about heroes who wanted to live but died,” says the description on the “Airport” cover.
Loiko’s producer in Ukraine, Victoria Butenko, told the Kyiv Post that the negotiations with Hollywood raised doubts from the very beginning.
“It was more like a communication between lawyers and agents. They told us no details about the artistic side of the story. But we understood that the studios wanted to take Loiko’s stories as a base and make up their own story,” said Butenko.
Butenko said the idea to get “Airport” to the silver screen isn’t dead. But it may not be done in Hollywood after all. Butenko said that studios in Ukraine and Russia expressed interest in the story. However, the Russian studio got a categorical rejection from Loiko.
Butenko expects the new interest in the West to spark after “Airport” English translation is released in 2016.
“So maybe the talks about the screen adaptation will renew,” said Butenko.
