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Sahara
Promotional poster for Sahara
Directed by	Breck Eisner
Produced by	Stephanie Austin Howard Baldwin Karen Baldwin Mace Neufeld
Written by	Clive Cussler (novel) James V. Hart Thomas Dean Donnelly Joshua Oppenheimer John C. Richards
Starring	Matthew McConaughey Steve Zahn Penélope Cruz Lambert Wilson Lennie James Delroy Lindo William H. Macy Patrick Malahide Glynn Turman Rainn Wilson
Music by	Clint Mansell
Cinematography	Seamus McGarvey
Editing by	Andrew MacRitchie
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date(s)	April 8, 2005
Running time	124 min.
Language	English
Budget	$130 million
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Sahara is a 2005 action/adventure film, directed by Breck Eisner, based on the best-selling book of the same name by Clive Cussler.

Though it opened at #1, grossing $18 million on its first weekend, Sahara is considered one of the biggest financial flops in Hollywood history.^[1][2] From the financial perspective, Sahara was unusual because it performed reasonably well, generating $122 million in gross box-office sales.^[1] However, the movie was beset by high costs, including a $160-million production and $81.1 million in distribution expenses.^[1] The film lost approximately $105 million according to a financial executive assigned to the movie;^[2] however Hollywood accounting methods assign losses at $78.3 million, taking into account projected revenue.^[1] According to Hollywood accounting, the film drew in revenue of $202.9 million against expenses of $281.2 million.^[1]

The Los Angeles Times presented an extensive special report on April 15, 2007 dissecting the budget of Sahara as an example of how Hollywood movies can cost so much to produce and fail; many of the often closely held documents had become public domain due to a lawsuit involving the film.^[3]

Contents 1 Plot 2 Promotion 3 Legal problems 4 Discrepancies 5 Trivia 6 Cast 7 See also 8 References 9 External links

Marine Engineer, explorer and former US Navy Seal Dirk Pitt (Matthew McConaughey) travels to Mali, to search for what the locals call "The Ship of Death", the lost Civil War ironclad warship CSS Texas that has a mysterious cargo. Pitt and his longtime friend Al Giordino (Steve Zahn) manage to thwart the assassination of Doctor Eva Rojas (Penélope Cruz), a doctor with the United Nations World Health Organization, who is investigating the source of a disease that is wreaking havoc in the area. The cause is a vast amount of industrial waste that is threatening to cause an environmental disaster. It is up to Pitt and his associates at the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) to locate the source of the pollution and shut it down, and explore the connection between the deaths and the missing ironclad.

Tagline: Dirk Pitt. Adventure has a new name.

To promote the film, actor Matthew McConaughey drove his own personal Airstream trailer (painted with a large Sahara movie poster on each side) across America, stopping at military bases and many events, such as the Daytona 500 (to Grand Marshal the race), premiering the movie to fans, signing autographs, and doing interviews at each stop. The trip's highlights were shown on an E! channel special to coincide with the film's release. McConaughey also kept a running blog of his trip on MTV's entertainment website. Both MTV and the film's distributor, Paramount Pictures, are owned by Viacom.

According to McConaughey, this film was intended to be the first in a franchise of films based on Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels (much like the James Bond film franchise), but the slow pace at which the film earned back its production cost has stalled any plans for a sequel or a franchise.

In February 2005, Cussler took legal action against Philip Anschutz, the producer, for failing to consult him on the script.^[4]

Cussler is suing the film's makers for breach of contract. Producer Anschutz is counter suing Cussler for "alleged blackmail and sabotage attempts against the film prior to its 2005 release." Cussler claims that his initial brief of "absolute control" over the book's adaptation to the big screen was compromised and this contributed to it becoming a box office failure. In a statement to a Los Angeles court, Cussler says, "They deceived me right from the beginning. They kept lying to me... and I just got fed up with it." Anschutz's lawyer believes Cussler's behavior played a big role in the film's financial woes. He says, "It is the height of arrogance for Cussler to take $10 million to make a movie and then torpedo the franchise."

On 15 May 2007 the jury awarded Anschutz $5 million but they also said the judge should decide if Anschutz's company, Bristol Bay Productions should have to pay $8 million to Cussler for rights to a second book.

• The real CSS Texas was unfinished when Richmond fell. It was captured intact by Union forces, but never used.
• Jefferson Davis did not regard the fall of Richmond as the end of the Confederacy. Had a ship been able to escape with a fortune in gold, he would have sent it to another Confederate port, or possibly to Mexico, an ally while ruled by Emperor Maximilian.
• When Dirk Pitt is explaining the history of the five Confederate gold dollars, he says that Jefferson Davis had them made in 1865 and gave four of them to his top generals: Lee, Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, and Johnson. Stonewall Jackson had died in 1863 and Stuart in 1864, so it would have been impossible to give gold coins to them in 1865.
• Al Giordino is described in the books as being stocky and muscular, able to lift 100 pound rocks with ease, where as Steve Zahn bears no resemblance to this. However, on the extras on the DVD, it states that due to his hair color and other qualitative appearances, they could not find anyone who fit the description.

Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines. The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.

• During the opening sequence, while the camera moves around Pitt's office, many newspaper clippings are shown, detailing many of Pitt's past adventures. One of them is entitled "The men who raised the Titanic", a reference to the novel Raise the Titanic! also a movie of the same name.
• The film won the Irish Film and Television Academy award for Best Cinematography in 2005, going to the film's cinematographer, Seamus McGarvey BSC.
• Lambert Wilson, who played Yves Massarde, also starred in another film called Sahara in 1983, although not based on Clive Cussler's book.
• The car Dirk drives in the car chase scene is a 1936 Avions Voisin C28.

• Matthew McConaughey — Dirk Pitt
• Steve Zahn — Al Giordino
• Penélope Cruz — Eva Rojas
• Lambert Wilson — Yves Massarde
• Dayna Cussler — Kitty Mannock (scenes deleted)
• Clint Dyer — Oshodi
• Lennie James — General Kazim
• Delroy Lindo — CIA agent Carl
• William H. Macy — Admiral James Sandecker
• Patrick Malahide — Ambassador Polidori
• Nathan Osgood — Gun Lt.
• Billy Seymour — Powder Monkey
• Glynn Turman — Dr. Frank Hopper
• Mark Wells — Sailor Who Drops Gold
• Rainn Wilson — Rudi Gunn

• 2005 in film

• Official site
• Sahara at the Internet Movie Database
• Sahara on RottenTomatoes
• Sahara at Box Office Mojo

Preceded by Sin City

Box office number-one films of 2005 (USA) April 10, 2005

Succeeded by The Amityville Horror