EXCLUSIVE
The film business came through the convulsion that was the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping case in most ways unscathed. The execs went on running their companies, the agents marched on down Wilshire Boulevard, and most of the big-shot lawyers kept working with their big-shot clients.
The conspicuous exception was director John McTiernan. Scrappy as one of his action stars, he's been contesting his guilt in an almost self-destructive series of legal moves.
But now he aims to use his -- perhaps temporary -- freedom to mount a movie.
McTiernan's case was always a sideshow alongside the feds' main focus on the central figures in a racketeering enterprise. A volley of sentences came in December 2008, when disgraced but defiant P.I. Pellicano was sentenced to 15 years in prison as ringleader of a conspiracy to wiretap (among others) some notable Hollywood names.
Also read: Pellicano Mess Lands John McTiernan in Jail
It seemed to put a stopper on the industry’s already deflated expectations of a juicy scandal. And then-prosecutor Dan Saunders is just fine with that.
“It’s very easy for media pundits to run a list of names that they think should have been charged -- [as in] `Oh, come on, they must have known,' ” said Saunders, who’s since moved from the U.S. Attorney's office to the gentler environs of Santa Monica’s Bingham McCutchen firm. "But we don’t charge people with a criminal offense unless we can prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. To do otherwise -- despite the desires of various entertainment writers in Hollywood -- would be irresponsible.”
Now, three years after the guilty verdicts came down, the last man standing for the town to speculate about is McTiernan.
The feisty and not untalented director, now 62, had been unhorsed while trying to manage his second act. His reputation as an action craftsman had taken a sharp dive with 2002’s "Rollerball," even as he was caught on tape using Pellicano to investigate the film's producer, Charles Roven, over supposed -- and never substantiated -- misuse of production money.
Then, Pellicano (pictured, right) was linked to an intimidation campaign directed against reporter Anita Busch, who’d incurred the wrath of Mike Ovitz. (Remember the infamous dead fish on the cracked windshield of her car with a note reading “STOP”?)
A FBI investigation turned up a host of Pellicano henchmen and a gaggle of clients -- McTiernan prominent among the latter.
A FBI agent surprised the director one evening with a phone call and a series of questions as to whether he knew of Pellicano’s misdeeds and had triggered and exploited any of them. McTiernan flat-out lied, later claiming he was incapacitated at the time.
Offered a relatively light stretch of four months’ incarceration for lying to a government agency, McTiernan balked and fought the case, his second miscue.
