30 Minutes Or Less Producers Claim Ignorance Of Real Pizza Bomber, Brian Wells
August 8, 2011 by Hollywoodite
30 Minutes Or Less looks like it’s going to suck anyway and hopefully this latest development will begin something of a backlash to what’s a completely horrific movie idea. It was apparent, upon the release of this movie’s first trailer, that its story arc would follow protagonist Jesse Eisenberg of The Social Network as he delivered pizzas in a bad neighbourhood and forcibly had a bomb strapped to him. The rest of the plot has something to do with dancing around unfunny jokes by Aziz Ansari and the threat to detonate if Eisenberg doesn’t rob banks for his abductors.
Sound familiar? It should, since that’s the loose set of events, ignoring the unfunny comic relief, that occurred for real in 2003. There was a 46-year-old pizza delivery guy named Brian Wells who was suspected of committing a hoax by police. He claimed he’d been abducted and had a bomb strapped around his neck. Police seemed to think it was a dummy device and held of minutes too late to call the bomb squad. Wells died while being recorded by news cameras (the video of his head being blown off by the neck bomb is easy to find on YouTube, but it’s gross so it’s not being posted here). A friend of Wells is calling out producers of 30 Minutes Or Less for turning this into a “trash” comedy.
TMZ spoke with one of Brian’s closest friends who tells us he’s outraged that Hollywood would mock Wells’ death calling the movie “trash.” The friend tells us, “It’s stupid the movie is even coming out… producers can go jump in a lake for all I care!” He adds, “Doesn’t Brian have a right to die? They’re blowing something up that should never have even happened in the first place and now they wanna make a joke out it… it’s really tragic.” – via TMZ.
Producers are playing dumb and the scriptwriters are playing dumber. Because there’s no part of decapitation by bomb that doesn’t scream “comedy.”
A rep for Columbia Pictures tells TMZ, “Neither the filmmakers nor stars the stars of ’30 Minutes or Less’ were aware of this crime prior to their involvement in the film.” The rep adds, “The writers were vaguely familiar with what had occurred and wrote an original screenplay that does not mirror the real-life tragedy. ” – via TMZ.
Above is the first trailer. The trailer below is newer and it shows even more of the overlapping stories of 30 Minutes Or Less and the real Pizza Bomber.