Eventually, Sorkin packed most of it into what Hanks calls a ''rock-'em, sock-'em'' script, which the star then dangled under the nose of Mike Nichols. (''Mike was always interested,'' Hanks says. ''We'd be fools not to give it to him.'') ''I read it,'' remembers the Oscar-winning director of The Graduate, Silkwood, and Working Girl. ''And I thought, 'S---. I'm stuck.''' Nichols rang up Roberts, his favorite actress since the two worked together on 2004's Closer, and Hoffman, whom he'd directed on stage in Chekhov's The Seagull. Next thing you know, the bunch of them were stuck on a mountaintop in Morocco making a movie in the middle of a monsoon. ''We ended up having to reshoot a lot of that [Pakistan refugee camp] scene in Los Angeles,'' Nichols says of a location sequence that got scuttled by floods last winter. ''I'm thinking of offering a cash prize on the DVD to anyone who can spot which part was shot in Morocco and which in Mystery Mesa.'' The weather issues added to the film's total budget — about $75 million — but nobody at Universal complained too much. ''With the pedigree of the people involved — Mike Nichols, Julia, Phil, me... This wasn't a brave movie for the studio to make,'' Hanks notes slyly.
At least it wasn't at the time. Today, though, after watching so many others go down in flames, opening a political-themed movie, even an upbeat one with Tom and Julia, must make Universal execs feel like they're about to live through the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. The odds seem to be against them. ''I know, I know, it's got the word war in the title, and it takes you to foreign countries where there's lots of rubble and people wear turbans and have beards,'' groans Sorkin. ''But, honestly, I promise this movie is not a schlepp. It doesn't make anybody eat their vegetables or try to persuade you to a certain political point of view. I mean, it opens in a hotel suite in Las Vegas.''
Sorkin's script, in fact, does not include a single reference to al-Qaeda, suicide bombers, or even the Taliban — although in one early draft he did end the film with a portentous allusion to the Twin Towers. Instead, the point that some of the rockets the CIA slipped into Afghanistan in the 1980s wound up in the hands of people like Osama bin Laden is made more subtly. Toward the close of the film, a poignant Zen parable pops up in Hoffman's dialogue about the uncertain, unknowable future, and a quote by Charlie Wilson about how America ''f---ed up the endgame'' in Afghanistan appears on screen at the end (for the more politically attuned, there are also shout-outs in the script to John Murtha and Rudy Giuliani). ''We didn't want to hit anyone over the head with it,'' Sorkin explains. ''We assumed the people watching wouldn't be any dumber than the people who made the movie. That they would get it.''
NEXT PAGE: ''Our movie isn't about 9/11 or the war in Iraq,'' says director Mike Nichols. ''Those things are beneath the surface. They're unstated. Unspoken. But everybody knows they're there.''