A new movie about a moment in the life of Bobby Fischer is set to release around the country next Wednesday. The producers of the film were in contact with The Painful Truth for information about Fischer's time spent being wrapped in Armstrongism.
The WCG/Ambassador Foundation used Fischer as a publicity tool and took hundreds of thousands of dollars of his money over a ten year time period. Many attribute his decline into madness to have been initiated by the church and is aberrant teachings.
The Los Angeles Times had an article up today about the movie:
Tobey Maguire moves through chess king Bobby Fischer's checkered life in 'Pawn Sacrifice'
The movie, which opens Wednesday in Los Angeles in limited release, works as a psychological thriller that begins in Fischer's troubled childhood, then shifts to a sports drama with all the tension building toward Fischer's match with Spassky. Schreiber, speaking beautiful Russian, plays against Maguire's wild-eyed intensity with elegance and humanity.
Together, they illustrate how both men were imprisoned by chess; Fischer by his own mind and Spassky by the Soviet regime.
Documentary footage is interspersed with the chess-playing dialogue-free scenes as Zwick aimed to shift between Fischer's private hell and the media circus he lived. The effect is "a fragmented portrait that wasn't dissimilar to what his life might have been," said Zwick.
Fischer joined the apocalyptic cult Worldwide Church of God for a time, then ended up in Pasadena, consumed by paranoia and living under a pseudonym. In 1992, he replayed Spassky in war-torn Yugoslavia. But the match violated U.N. sanctions and the U.S. issued an arrest warrant for Fischer. The chess champ lived the rest of his life in exile, occasionally coming out of seclusion to issue venomous attacks, particularly aimed at Jews.