Originally published April 24, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
Filmmaker Michael Mann and producer Michael De Luca are teaming up to adapt Mark Bowden’s upcoming book Hue 1968 – which details the Tet Offensive, a turning point of American involvement in the Vietnam War – as an eight-to-ten hour miniseries.
Hue was the centerpiece of Hanoi’s 1968 Tet Offensive in which Hanoi sought to win the war in one stroke by launching a series of surprise attacks against military and civilian targets, and the book – and the upcoming series – will explore the drama through the eyes of people on all sides of the conflict.
“[The book is] a masterpiece of intensely dramatic non-fiction,” said Mann. “Bowden’s achievement is in making ‘them’ into us. We are them. There are no background people; people abstracted into statistics, body counts. There is the sense that everybody is somebody, as each is in the actuality of their own lives. The brilliance of Bowden’s narrative, the achievement of interviewing hundreds of people on all sides and making their human stories his foundation, is why Hue 1968 rises to the emotional power and universality of For Whom The Bell Tolls and All Quiet On The Western Front.”
Mann is set to direct multiple episodes of the drama, as well as producing with De Luca.
