218 LONE SURVIVOR
Mr. Luttrell couldn’t remember but that could be corroborated from other sources.
The core of the book— the battle and the rescue— relied entirely on Mr. Luttrell’s
memory” (Rich, 2007). Over a four- month period Robinson produced a 135,000-
word manuscript, the U.S. Navy reviewed and approved it as accurate, and then
Robinson and Luttrell met with five publishers in New York to pitch the book. In an
auction Little, Brown and Com pany won the contract for a seven- figure advance and
rushed the book into production. Meanwhile Luttrell returned to active duty
and shipped out to Iraq as part of Navy SEAL Team Five during Operation Iraqi
Freedom— until further injuries forced his medical discharge from military ser-
vice on 7 June 2007. Five days later, Little, Brown and Com pany published Lone
Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing [sic] and the Lost Heroes of SEAL
Team 10. Showcased on NBC’s The Today Show and touted by right- wing media
pundits Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin, Lone Survivor went on to become a
national bestseller. Motoko Rich’s aforementioned review was laudatory, but Rich
went on to note, “Along with the tragic story about how Mr. Luttrell lost his com-
rades, the book is spiked with unabashed braggadocio and patriotism, as well as
several polemical passages lashing out at the ‘liberal media’ for its role in sustain-
ing military rules of engagement that prevent soldiers from killing unarmed civil-
ians who may also be scouts or informers for terrorists.” After it reached No. 1 on
bestseller charts, Lone Survivor touched off a second bidding war in August 2007,
this time between Universal, Warner Bros., DreamWorks, and Sony for the film
rights, which Universal won, buying the property for $2 million up front, plus
5 percent against adjusted gross in a deal brokered by Ed Victor and Hollywood
super- lawyer Alan U. Schwartz of Greenberg Traurig. Eager to make Lone Survivor,
Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights) secured a deal with Universal by agreeing to direct
Battleship (2012), a big bud get sci-fi film that turned out to be a critically panned
box office bomb. Berg also agreed to direct Lone Survivor for the minimum fee
allowed by the Director’s Guild of Amer i ca (DGA) and convinced his principal
actors— Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster, and Eric Bana—
to work for reduced pay. Berg wrote the screen adaptation of Lone Survivor in close
consultation with Marcus Luttrell, whom he had cultivated early on.Production
The 42- day shoot on Lone Survivor took place in October and November 2012 in
New Mexico to take advantage of a 25 percent state tax credit. The initial eight
days of filming occurred at locations in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Santa
Fe National Forest— mountains ranging from 11,000 to 12,000 feet that doubled
for mountains in the Hindu Kush between Af ghan i stan and Pakistan. Production
then moved to Chilili, New Mexico, for two weeks, where wooded areas were used
to film several battle scenes. Berg’s art department built sets to simulate an Afghan
village occupied by Ahmad Shah’s Taliban insurgents, as well as the Pashtun vil-
lage where Luttrell is fi nally rescued. The shoot then moved to Kirtland AFB in
Albuquerque, which doubled for scenes set at Bagram Airfield in Af ghan i stan. The
shoot wrapped up on sound stages at I-25 Studios in Albuquerque for bluescreen
work and interior scenes (e.g., Gulab’s house and Bagram Airfield’s patrol base