Hollywood Plugs Its Tale of a Leak

"It's a jumping-off point."

While the movie is still being filmed, and many elements could change or end up on the cutting-room floor, the basic outline is this: A modern-day fictional president is almost assassinated, and the finger is pointed at Venezuela. In the course of her diligent reporting, and without revealing her source (and our lips are vacuum-sealed), Beckinsale outs Erica Van Doren as a CIA agent pretending to be a mere soccer mom. She's married to the former ambassador to Great Britain, who's an outspoken critic of the fictional administration. (Any resemblance to Joe Wilson is purely intentional.)

In Hollywood, everybody gets an injection of youth. So in the movie the outed spook is played by Vera Farmiga, 34, whose breakout role was in last year's "The Departed." Her ambassador husband is played by Jamey Sheridan of the TV show "Law & Order: Criminal Intent." From a brief snippet of unedited film, we can tell you that Farmiga plays her spy as one tough cookie who is fluent in profanity. She accuses Rachel Armstrong of being "a toady for the administration." The Judith Miller character also gets a husband, a professional novelist (he writes thrillers about the Mossad) played by David Schwimmer, formerly of "Friends."

In the role of special prosecutor Patton Dubois, a character Lurie says is modeled after the real Libby prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, Lurie chose actor Matt Dillon.

In a scene filmed Friday, the newspaper's in-house counsel, Avril Aaronson, played by Noah Wyle ("ER"), remarks that the appointment of a special prosecutor is not good news for the paper. "Unlimited time, unlimited moola and unlimited publicity," warns Wyle, who in a later scene ticks off the prosecutor's r¿sum¿ -- U.S. attorney in Northern Michigan, lead prosecutor on the embassy bombing case in Nairobi -- and says, "He's been the next big thing for a while now. . . . He's hot stuff and wants to run for office."

For his part, Wyle sat down with constitutional law expert and professor Floyd Abrams, who argued for Miller and the New York Times in the leak case. Abrams is serving as a technical adviser on the film and will play the role of a judge. They talked First Amendment and Abrams's recollections of what Miller went through. "In my little circle in California," Wyle says, "she wasn't exactly the symbol of the bastion of free expression. . . . She was more the apologist for the administration." But Wyle says the film doesn't really go there.

Starring in the role of the boss (a.k.a. Bill Keller of the New York Times) is Angela Bassett as Bonnie Benjamin, editor in chief of the Capital Sun, who tells Rachel in one scene, "If you want to go to war, we're behind you," meaning, of course, not the war in Iraq, but the war against the special prosecutor.

Then she utters these immortal words: "The paper will pay your legal fees to the end."