The real war dogs story movie#
The real war dogs story full#

Dealings arms was his family’s business, so at 18, he took over his father’s company and set out to become an arms dealer himself – only he dealt solely with the U.S. The true origin story of Efraim Diveroli can make your head spin.

The real war dogs story movie#

Miles Teller has his own strange entryway into the film – his father e-mailed him with the news that the Rolling Stone article was being made into a movie and said that he’d be perfect for it. However, Hill reached out to the Hangover trilogy director and requested to play Efraim if a film version got off the ground. Jonah Hill would later explain that he tried to buy the rights to Lawson’s original article soon after it was published, only to learn that Phillips had beaten him to the punch.

The real war dogs story full#

Reading the original article today, you can see why director Todd Phillips snatched up the rights as soon as possible – this is a true story, but it is a true story full of sex, drugs, violence, intrigue and an increasing number of poor decisions. The dizzying rise and devastating fall of Diveroli and Packouz was initially recounted in Guy Lawson’s 2011 Rolling Stone story “The Stoner Arms Dealers: How Two American Kids Became Big-Time Weapons Traders.” Lawson later expanded the story into the book Arms and the Dudes, which was the original title for the film adaptation. As much as the film may diverge from the truth for the sake of cinematic drama, the core story remains jaw-droppingly true. Most astonishingly, both men were twentysomething stoners with no experience handling anything of this size or scope. They then embarked on a globetrotting misadventure that saw them dealing with shady crooks and corrupt politicians and dangerous soldiers in the name of making a fortune. In the mid-’00s, two kids named Efraim Diveroli and David Packouz managed to secure a $300 million contract with the United States government to supply allied forces in Afghanistan with arms and ammunition. War Dogs is based on one of those true stories that no one would actually believe if it were written as fiction.