10 Craziest Things That Have Been Made Into Movies

3. Declassified Documents - Argo

The success of Star Wars in the late seventies led to spate of rushed jobs attempting to get a piece of the space pie. Probably the most blatant example has to be Battle Beyond the Stars, a densely-plotted remake of The Magnificent Seven that nowadays looks like a poor parody. In amongst all the rip-offs, however, one mooted project never materialised. Thanks to Ben Affleck's Oscar-winning thriller we all now know that Argo, the Star Wars cash-in that never made it past pre-production, was in fact a cover for a covert CIA operation to get six American diplomats out of revolutionary Iran. The Canadian Caper (glad they didn't go with that name) had already been made into a film before, unimaginatively titled Escape from Iran, but as that came before the operation became declassified it's really a dramatisation of the cover story. Argo may make some rather large leaps of fancy in accounting the events, but using various sources informed by the real documents means it's certainly closer to the truth. With more previously-classified documents being made public, it's likely we'll see more previously-secret stories excitingly brought to the screen.