Earlier this year, GREEN BOOK took home the Academy Award for Best Picture, and director/co-writer Peter Farrelly is setting up his next feature film, which sounds like it could be another easy-going Oscar contender.
Variety reports that Peter Farrelly is set to direct a film based upon the book "The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A True Story of Friendship Stronger Than War" written by Joanna Molloy and John "Chickie" Donohue. The novel is based on the true story of Donohue, who left his home in New York with the simple task of tracking down and sharing a few beers with some old friends. Only problem was that it was 1967 and those friends were fighting in the Vietnam War. Farrelly will co-write the script alongside his GREEN BOOK co-writer Brian Currie as well as Pete Jones (HALL PASS). Donohue got a job on the Drake Victory, a merchant ship taking ammunition from New York to Vietnam, and shipped out with a duffel bag full of beer. However, in an interview with The New York Times, Donohue confessed that as it took two months to get there, he drank all the beer. After arriving in Qui Nhon harbor, he replenished his supply and met up with his friend Tom Collins. "I said, 'Chickie Donohue, what the hell are you doing here?'" Collins recalled. "He said, 'I came to bring you a beer.'"
A synopsis of "The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A True Story of Friendship Stronger Than War" via Amazon:
In 1967, John (Chick) Donohue was a 26-year-old U.S. Marine Corps veteran working as a merchant seaman when he was challenged one night in a New York City bar. The men gathered at this hearth had lost family and friends in the ongoing war in Vietnam. Now, they were seeing protesters turn on the troops. One neighborhood patriot proposed an idea many might deem preposterous: One of them should sneak into Vietnam, track down their buddies in combat, and give each of them messages of support from back home, maybe some laughs – and beer.
Chick volunteered for the mission. He sailed to Vietnam on a cargo ship carrying a backpack full of American beer, landing in Qui Nho'n in 1968. Things went awry when Chick got caught in the Tet Offensive, starting in the early hours as an eyewitness to the battle to retake the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, where he became stuck for months.