Proof of Life

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Proof of Life

Directed by	Taylor Hackford
Produced by	Tony Gilroy
Written by	Tony Gilroy
Starring	Russell Crowe, Meg Ryan, David Morse
Music by	Danny Elfman
Distributed by	Warner Brothers
Release date(s)	10th December 2000
Running time	135 min.
Language	English
Budget	$65,000,000
IMDb profile

Proof of Life is a 2000 film starring Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe. It is perhaps best remembered as the film during which the two lead actors had a romantic affair. At the time of filming, Ryan was married to Dennis Quaid, but the two divorced in 2001. The film's director, Taylor Hackford, blamed the film's failure at the box office on the publicity over Ryan and Crowe's affair.

The movie was inspired on William Prochnau's Vanity Fair magazine article "Adventures in the Ransom Trade".

1 Plot summary
2 Cast
3 Tecala
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Alice Bowman (Ryan) contacts Terry Thorne (Crowe) after her husband Peter (David Morse) is kidnapped by South American Rebels.

Thorne is an ex-military "K&R" (kidnap and ransom) expert whose inappropriate attraction to Alice drives him to rescue her husband in a twisted tale of romance amid the trauma of a kidnap situation.

[edit] Cast

[edit] Tecala

The Republic of Tecala, where "Proof of Life" is set, is a fictional South American country, although it is based on Ecuador. Tecala has an internal conflict between government forces and the Liberation Army of Tecala (ELT). The ELT was originally a Marxist guerrilla group supported by the Soviet Union, but after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the ELT began kidnapping people for ransom to fund their operations. The ELT was soon powerful enough to seize the cocaine trade in Tecala, supposedly the second-largest producer after Colombia (in real life, Bolivia is the second-largest cocaine producer). The ELT is still at war with the government, participating in military skirmishes and carrying out terrorist bombings in the capital city of Tecala. Maps show Tecala to be landlocked, although which countries surround it is unclear. Tecala also has oil wealth, which the U.S. hopes will overtake cocaine as the primary industry in Tecala. The population of Tecala are known as the Tecalefto people.