You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.

Hey folks, welcome to a bonus interview.

I was talking with Richard Clutter about his work on the film Never Cry Wolf.

Towards the end, I shifted gears a little bit and asked him about his work on the, what was

supposed to be, a pilot version of the man who fell to Earth.

You might have heard us talk about that on our Man Who Felt to Earth episode.

Well, he gives the backstory to why it was what it was.

I think you'll enjoy it.

What were those next gigs like for you?

Well, at some point, fairly soon, I sold a big spec for a lot of money to Sony.

And then, you know, I had a script that CIA, the coverage at CIA, they said it was the most intelligent script that they'd ever read.

And so I had, you know, meetings with Robert Redford and all kinds of people and action directors who would apologize for, you know, sullying me with their

sorted commercial project. And that's good, never got made. It got optioned a bunch of

times, but never got made because it was set in South Africa before the end of

apartheid and was based on a true story which I could not acknowledge.

It was told to me, the story was told to me by someone who was involved, and I don't

want to give any more details about this, with one of the major international peace organizations,

a big foundation peace organization.

And he was smuggling diamonds for the ANC. And so this group was called diamonds. And it was about that character and, you know, and South African black characters trying to do whatever they could to advance the cause of freedom in South Africa. Everyone responded to it,

but events in South Africa were changing rapidly at the time. And so no one wanted to make a

looking back movie. They all wanted to make a looking forward movie. So while everybody was

interested in and I met with everybody about the script, you know, after Charity's Fire, that director,

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