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A new documentary with the working title of House of Saud, helmed by filmmaker Alex Gibney and author Lawrence Wright will examine the United States’ tenuous relationship with Saudi Arabia. Showtime announced Monday that the film was in development but did not announce a projected premiere date.
The film will attempt to make sense of how the White House works with the Saudi royal family, beginning with the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the way the Trump administration seemed to walked on eggshells when it came to implicating Saudis. It will examine the history between the countries, as well as supposedly disturbing dealings between Trump’s administration and Saudi Arabia’s Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Gibney, who won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, is producing the film under his Jigsaw Productions imprint in collaboration with Wright, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. They previously worked together on a dramatization of The Looming Tower, starring Jeff Daniels, and the documentary, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, based on Wright’s book of the same title.
In addition to House of Saud, Gibney recently served as executive producer for Showtime’s docuseries, Enemies: The President, Justice and the FBI. He also produced 2013’s History of the Eagles — about the rock band —and directed 2016’s Zero Days, about a computer virus, for the network. In 2017, he helmed Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge for HBO, chronicling the magazine’s first 50 years.
