Oliver Stone Plans To Make Movie About George W. Bush
January 21st, 2008
By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Hide the kids. Give sympathies to movie critics who’ll have to sit through it in advance. And get ready for the talk show hosts and bloggers to become as red-faced as a certain former President as they go haywire about inaccuracies and a less-than-unbiased portrayal. Or is that in itself a batch of highly-unfair assumptions? We’ll all see. Literally.
Because no matter what…Wait. Let’s wait a second until many of you hear the news — and some of you scream:
Director Oliver Stone is planning a film about George W. Bush. (Scream here) Variety reports:
Oliver Stone has set his sights on his next directing project, “Bush,” a film focusing on the life and presidency of George W. Bush, and attached Josh Brolin to play the title role.
The director has begun quietly shopping a script by his “Wall Street” co-writer Stanley Weiser.
Pic will be produced by Moritz Borman, who teamed with Stone on “World Trade Center” and “Alexander,” and Jon Kilik, a producer of “Alexander” as well as “Pinkville,” the pre-strike project about the Army’s investigation of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam that Stone expected to direct until United Artists pulled the plug late last year.
Borman said Weiser’s script was completed before the WGA strike and was ready to shoot and that many of Stone’s “Pinkville” crew jumped right into “Bush.” If financing materializes quickly enough, the film could start production by April and could be in theaters for the election or the inauguration.
When the great film critic Pauline Kael retired from the New Yorker Magazine, someone asked her if she’d be back and she said no, explaining:“”The prospect of having to sit through another Oliver Stone movie is too much.”
Will this movie likely have a point of view and conclusion we don’t already know in advance? Variety again:
One need only Google the words “Stone” and “Bush” to find plenty of the director’s critical comments about the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. Despite that, the director said he’s not looking to make an anti-Bush polemic. His goal is to use seminal events in Bush’s life to explain how he came to power, using a structure comparable to “The Queen.”
“It’s a behind-the-scenes approach, similar to ‘Nixon,’ to give a sense of what it’s like to be in his skin,” Stone told Daily Variety. “But if ‘Nixon’ was a symphony, this is more like a chamber piece, and not as dark in tone. People have turned my political ideas into a cliche, but that is superficial. I’m a dramatist who is interested in people, and I have empathy for Bush as a human being, much the same as I did for Castro, Nixon, Jim Morrison, Jim Garrison and Alexander the Great.”
Oh.
Stone declined to give his personal opinion of the president.
“I can’t give you that, because the filmmaker has to hide in the work,” Stone said. “Here, I’m the referee, and I want a fair, true portrait of the man. How did Bush go from an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world? It’s like Frank Capra territory on one hand, but I’ll also cover the demons in his private life, his bouts with his dad and his conversion to Christianity, which explains a lot of where he is coming from. It includes his belief that God personally chose him to be president of the United States, and his coming into his own with the stunning,
preemptive attack on Iraq. It will contain surprises for Bush supporters and his detractors.”
Still, you can bet money in Vegas that piece that the final product is unlikely to have Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Bill O’Reilly urging their audiences to watch it.
Its audience will mostly be people critical of GWB — which, come to think of it, means it’ll have a HUGE audience domestically and internationally.
It’ll have big B.O. (Variety talk for “box office,” that is.)
This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 11:48 am and is filed under George W. Bush, Politics, Movies, Entertainment. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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