Valerie Plame flick, CIA thriller, to debut at Cannes

Talk about making lemonade from a lemon: Former undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame gets a star turn next month at the Cannes Film Festival with the debut of “Fair Game,” based on the ordeal she and diplomat husband Joe Wilson suffered from a White House campaign to discredit his role in exposing the fabrication of intelligence justifying the invasion of Iraq.

“Suffer,” of course, is relative, when you’ve been catapulted to liberal icon, pictured on the cover of Vanity Fair , written a best-selling memoir and portrayed by Australian megastar Naomi Watts in a major feature film.

Sean Penn plays her husband Wilson, who ripped the lid off a phony document used by the Bush administration to accuse Saddam Hussein of secretly buying uranium from Niger to make a nuclear bomb.

It’s the second Hollywood take on the Plame affair. But 2008’s highly fictionalized “Nothing But the Truth” focused on then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s jail stint for refusing to reveal the source of her information that Plame, an undercover CIA agent, played a role in her husband's assignment to investigate the Niger document.

Based on the Plame memoir by the same name, “Fair Game,” directed by Doug Liman (“The Bourne Identity”), is still searching for a distributor, according to news reports.

But according to Los Angeles Times blogger Steven Zeitchik, Summit Entertainment, “best known for distributing the films in the Kristen Stewart vampire franchise, has an offer on the table.”

Summit “got a pretty strong taste of awards glory,” Zeitchik noted Thursday, when it bought distribution rights to "The Hurt Locker," the dark-horse winner of this year’s Best Picture award.