John McTiernan, once great action movie director and the man who brought us Die Hard, Die Hard: With a Vengeance, The Hunt for Red October and Predator, has been sentenced to spend a year in jail for his part in the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping case. For those of you unfamiliar with the case, it basically involves Pellicano – a “private investigator for the stars” – who was caught using illegal wiretapping to record the phone conversations of producer Charles Roven at the expense of McTiernan. When asked if he knew about the wiretapping by an FBI agent, McTiernan denied it, but by that point the Feds had already obtained recorded conversations between McTiernan and Pellicano discussing wiretapping. Because of his role in the whole thing and because he lied to the FBI, McTiernan has been sentenced to spend 12 months behind bars.
Seems to me that McTiernan should have known the conversations between he and Pellicano were being recorded. You can’t trust a wiretapper, people. While McTiernan really hasn’t made any movies in the past seven years, he was working on one at the time of his sentencing – a film called The Camel Wars, which was due out next year. Guess we’ll have to wait a little longer before we see anything from John McTiernan again.