← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 9560 | Posts: 7 | Started: 2003-09-05
2003-09-05 21:13 | User Profile
[color=blue]20 years ago, Rupert Murdoch's NY POST took the author of a puff-pastry entertainment book - "The Golden Turkey Awards" - gave him a movie-reviewing gig,and in short order Michael Medved was on his way to ZioConservative sainthood. Before long, Medved had conned his way into high-profile political commentary. And it all began with his goofing on such deathless works of art as ROBOT MONSTER.
A few years later, Murdoch anointed a rookie tv-critic, a doughy middlebrow eminently qualified to pass judgment on WHO'S THE BOSS and DR QUINN, MEDICINE WOMAN. And once again, lightning suspiciously struck - only this time it was John Podhoretz whose analytical abilities were judged sufficiently parsing to begin explaining how the world truly worked to the rest of us. His ascension was even more rapid than Medved's.
Now the POST is grooming another 'fair & balanced' Hebraic intellect for the task of national-affairs commentary, one Adam Buckman. How do I know he's being slotted for greater things? Well, he's the tv critic, fer gosh sakes - do I hafta draw you a map? Given the sage and august manner in which his prose comports itself in the following 'tv review', I'd say he's even further ahead of schedule than Medved & Poddy fils. What is it about dumbed-down bread and circuses for the slavering masses that so ably equips the keen News Corp intellects of tomorrow, I wonder?[/color]
[url=http://www.nypost.com/seven/09042003/entertainment/4864.htm]http://www.nypost.com/seven/09042003/enter...inment/4864.htm[/url]
DUBYA ON TOP
September 4, 2003 -- GEORGE Bush is my hero. And because I feel that way, I don't need a TV movie to bolster my confidence in him and the Administration he runs.
My own attitude about the President and the War on Terror has been unambiguous from Day One: Let's get it on. Go ahead and attack the people allied against us. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya - I don't care who they are, and I'm not losing any sleep over the punishment we've doled out already or will dole out in the coming months or even years.
I lived through 9/11 and its aftermath from less than a mile away from the World Trade Center and I can't think back on those days without a sense of unrequited anger.
I need no reminding of what we all went through in those days.
But for those who do, Showtime's new TV movie - "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," premiering Sunday night at 8 - is just the thing to re-stir the heart and get the blood boiling once again.
The movie is a two-hour dramatization of the Bush administration in action in the moments, hours and days immediately following the 9/11/01 attacks.
President Bush - played by Timothy Bottoms - is portrayed as adapting quickly to the crisis, forthrightly establishing his authority in a number of areas, especially when he overruled his Secret Service overseers and demanded to be flown back to the White House before his safety could be assured.
The movie is produced and written by Lionel Chetwynd, a Hollywood veteran who has written a number of diverse TV movies over the years, including "Siege at Ruby Ridge" (1996), "Moses" (1996) and "Kissinger and Nixon" (1995) to name a few.
He's also an outspoken supporter of and activist in conservative causes, which has positioned him as somewhat of a gadfly in predominantly liberal Hollywood.
For that reason, some have already taken shots at his 9/11 movie with accusations that its portrayal of President Bush as an out-and-out hero is inaccurate and perhaps downright twisted.
It's a bizarre reaction to a movie based studiously on the factual record, which shows President Bush as a study in calm leadership in the days following the attacks, despite the sudden and enormous pressure brought to bear on his still-young Administration.
Showtime's movie is a reminder of both the trauma and heroism of those days. It also reminds us why we fight and what's at stake.
In the movie, Bush boils the U.S. reaction down to its very essence. "Liberty is God's gift," the movie Bush tells his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice (Penny Johnson Jerald). "It is not negotiable on this watch."
2003-09-05 21:39 | User Profile
I do so look forward to Buckman lecturing us mere mortals on the finer points of international relations, which can probably be simplified immesurably so that us hicks can understand it. Allow me to prognosticate a little and I'll tell you that his Enemies of the USA list is gonna bear a strong resemblance to anyone Sharon finds the least troubling to the sleep of the Beanie race.
As far as the subject of the review, I really don't have a good enough supply of vomit bags to watch the thing, but I may take one for the team anyway and report back here on the state of propaganda, although I can tell you now, "crude" and "transparent pap" will most likely be featured in the verbiage. But who knows?
especially when he overruled his Secret Service overseers and demanded to be flown back to the White House before his safety could be assured.
So that's what he was doing at Barksdale AFB!
The movie is produced and written by Lionel Chetwynd, a Hollywood veteran...
Well, that tells you pretty much all you need to know right there.
He's also an outspoken supporter of and activist in conservative causes
So I suppose we'll see him making a movie about uncontrolled cucaracha migration over the southern border and all the wonderful effects therefrom?
Or did they mean "activist" in the Sean Hannity sense of the word?
a movie based studiously on the factual record, which shows President Bush as a study in calm leadership in the days following the attacks
I couldn't come up with a witty riposte for this comment. I was laughing too hard!
It also reminds us why we fight and what's at stake.
Israel's convenience, Israel's security, Israel's easy access to cheap oil, Israel's looting ( I mean "finding lost property in") Iraq.
Did I miss any?
2003-09-06 02:47 | User Profile
Gentlemen,
My own attitude about the President and the War on Terror has been unambiguous from Day One: Let's get it on. Go ahead and attack the people allied against us. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya - I don't care who they are, and I'm not losing any sleep over the punishment we've doled out already or will dole out in the coming months or even years.** **
Yes, I can see how he would be gung ho over this. After all, it's against the latest enemies the tribe has made. I am curious about this. What's this "we" crap? I don't see the Israelis getting some of this good stuff. I only see Americans, Brits, and other small forces from Europe.
**I need no reminding of what we all went through in those days.
**
No, but if you did, I don't doubt you have plenty of experience from reminding folks about the "holocaust."
**It's a bizarre reaction to a movie based studiously on the factual record, which shows President Bush as a study in calm leadership in the days following the attacks, despite the sudden and enormous pressure brought to bear on his still-young Administration. **
Yes, we have seen that in the face of the Mexivasion of the U.S. W really told old Vincente off.
A note aside about Lionel Chetwynd.
I wonder why Buckman didn't mention Chetwynd's movie The Hanoi Hilton? That movie, in my opinion, was a realistic portrayal of what the captured U.S. P.O.W.s had to undergo at the hands of the North Vietnamese. 16 years ago when this movie came out there was an article in Insight Magazine where Chetwynd was told by the producer that while he thought the movie was powerful, the movie wouldn't be released except on a cassette version where I saw it. I can't remember exactly what the producer used as an excuse, except it was weasel words. The producer's name?
Il Ragno,
ZioConservative I like that!
2003-09-06 11:03 | User Profile
[color=blue]Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.[/color]
[url=http://www.jewhoo.com/display_entries.asp?p_category_id=&p_parent_id=]http://www.jewhoo.com/display_entries.asp?...d=&p_parent_id=[/url]
Lionel Chetwynd - Primarily a screenwriter, his first major directorial effort is the film, "Varian's War", (2001). It is about the efforts of American Varian Fry to rescue the cream of Jewish and non-Jewish anti-Nazi intellectuals and artists from Europe, 1939-41. Chetwynd was born and raised in Canada. His screenplay for "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" (co-written with Mordecai Richler) was nominated for a 1974 Oscar. Recently, Chetwynd has specialized in historical dramas for television. These have included "Color of Justice" (Showtime), "Kissinger and Nixon" and the Bible saga "Joseph" (both TNT), "P.T. Barnum" (A&E) and "Ruby Ridge" (CBS). Full profile in recent article on the following link. Post-script: We posted this entry based on a feature article about the Varian Fry film made before the film was released. The "Showtime" film got bad reviews. It was a poor drama and poor history. It was also roundly denounced by historians and by a foundation dedicated to Varian Fry. Chetwynd, for little apparent reason, changed critical historical facts and even implied that Fry was gay. The latter is particularly mysterious since there is absolutely nothing in Fry's background that would lead one to this conclusion. It's interesting to look at the well written historical criticism on the second link. Here is the essence of the dramatic review of the film from a smart reviewer in "The New York Jewish Week": 'Given a strong cast, headed by the usually reliable Hurt, one would expect that good acting might redeem this projectââ¬â¢s shortcomings. Regrettably, it just doesnââ¬â¢t happen. Hurt plays Fry as a fussy collection of tics, kitted out like an Oscar Wilde imitator. Julia Ormond, who plays his assistant, is too busy struggling to maintain an American accent to be bothered with characterization. The Chagalls, Heinrich Mann--are reduced to cartoonish but loveable eccentrics, and Hannah Arendt becomes a sort of philosophical good-time girl, sexy but smart. Varianââ¬â¢s War has the distinction of being a fairly complete catastrophe. To add to the catatonic direction and wildly out-of-tune acting, the film has the hermetically sealed look of a total studio product. The streets of Marseilles and Berlin have never been so clean, so utterly devoid of life. Even the wall graffiti is neat and ordered, as befits a film that lacks even the slightest semblance of reality." Please don't make another film Mr. Chetwynd! One terrible film on an unquestionably great man is enough.
[url=http://www.forward.com/issues/2001/01.04.20/arts2.html]http://www.forward.com/issues/2001/01.04.20/arts2.html[/url]
A Hollywood Gadfly Celebrates a Wartime Rescuer By CATHERINE SEIPP
Hollywood has become less stringently liberal than it was in 1992 when screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd, looking for an antidote to the unquestioning local political tone, first organized a group of Hollywood contrarians under the aegis of David Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, the Los Angeles-based neoconservative think tank. It may still be true that, as Mr. Chetwynd often points out, "when a person in Hollywood tells you they're a liberal, they're not telling you about a series of political choices they've made; they're offering you their credentials as a good human being." But the times they are a-changing.
"Varian's War," which premieres April 22 on Showtime, is the first script Mr. Chetwynd has written and also directed since his 1987 pro-prisoner-of-war "The Hanoi Hilton" offended Hollywood in general (not to mention critics). The new Showtime film, which stars William Hurt, Lynn Redgrave and Julia Ormond, is the true story of Varian Fry, the Harvard-educated New England WASP who, with no help from the United States government, began rescuing Jews from Vichy France in 1939, saving the lives of Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall and other luminaries. During production, Mr. Chetwynd was annoyed to hear someone complain that the film was too hard on the Vichy French. On the other hand, Barbra Streisand is executive producer. If that isn't a détente between Hollywood's establishment left and renegade right, what is?
In a recent interview with the Forward, Mr. Chetwynd said, "The State Department at the time was pretty much pro-Hitler, so Varian Fry's cause could be construed in its day as a left-wing cause." But in recent years, anything that celebrates patriotic heroism or depicts a war in which there is clearly a good and clearly a bad side is often perceived as right wing. "In our day it has become inappropriate to examine the finer aspects of American life," Mr. Chetwynd said. "There has been a gesture in that direction towards previous generations, with 'Saving Private Ryan' and, for that matter, Varian Fry. But to say that this is the most extraordinary society that humankind has ever seen, that America continues to be a beacon to the world, that a McDonald's on the Champs Elyséees is not the harbinger of the end of Western civilization ââ¬â this is not a popular notion. There's a confusion between politically left thought and credentials as an artist in Hollywood. The true artist must be on the left."
Mr. Chetwynd, whose screenplay for "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" (co-written with Mordecai Richler) was nominated for a 1974 Oscar, has for the past several years specialized in historical dramas for television. These have included "Color of Justice" (Showtime), "Kissinger and Nixon" and the Bible saga "Joseph" (both TNT), "P.T. Barnum" (A&E) and "Ruby Ridge" (CBS). "Varian's War" came about when one of its producers, Michael Deakin, was leafing through a magazine in a Kennedy Airport departure lounge and came across a 500-word article about Fry.
Mr. Deakin called Mr. Chetwynd to ask if he'd ever heard of the man. "I thought he couldn't have existed," Mr. Chetwynd said. "I mean, I spend all my time watching the History Channel and A&E and I said, 'If there was a man who had brought out people like Chagall and Ernst and Heinrich Mann ââ¬â the list is just extraordinary ââ¬â I would have known about it,' which was extraordinarily arrogant, but his story had been entirely, I believe, suppressed. The principal reason is because his enemies were not the Nazis; his enemies were the Vichy French. And we have carefully woven a myth, since the war, that France was an ally when in fact large parts of France were part of the Nazi conspiracy."
At a recent press conference, Mr. Chetwynd bristled at the suggestion that viewers might dismiss "Varian's War" as just another Holocaust movie. "The people that this man saved have enriched all our lives," he said, adding, "It is like the telling of the Exodus in the Haggada; you must tell it as not how God brought your ancestors out, but how he brought you out. Varian Fry saved a little part of all of us."
Mr. Chetwynd has a long history as a Hollywood gadfly. "I've a bad habit of doing these things," he once remarked cheerfully, a reference not only to organizing the conservative Wednesday Morning Club (named for the morning after the 1992 Clinton election) but also to his hackle-raising activities during the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike. A vocal spokesman for writers who wanted to call off the strike, Mr. Chetwynd was abrasively impatient with the large, pro-strike contingent of WGA members who, he claimed, didn't earn much anyway. David E. Kelley once jokingly introduced Mr. Chetwynd at a Hollywood gathering by saying, "If they created a lifetime achievement award for you, it would be a Lifetime Pariah Award." (Mr. Chetwynd supports the WGA in its current strike negotiations.)
Mr. Chetwynd was born in England and raised in Montreal, where he left school in 8th grade but nevertheless studied law at McGill University and later Oxford. He keeps the letter of acceptance from Oxford next to the letter of dismissal from his grammar school principal, who predicted that he would "come to no good end." In his youth, he was a leftist and dedicated union organizer. Because of this, he takes a rather bemused view of the firm grip the teachers' unions have on the direction of American public education.
"When I was organizing the railways and the garment workers," he said, "we weren't telling the railroads what routes to take or the factory owners how to style the dresses; we were concerned with our dignity in the workplace. But the teachers' unions are concerned with controlling the curriculum."
A longtime naturalized American citizen, Mr. Chetwynd was still voting Democrat until 1980. But he became disillusioned during the 1970s with the 20% inflation rate under former President Jimmy Carter, and also with the leftist spectacle of Vanessa Redgrave's playing a Holocaust survivor in "Playing for Time" while harping about "Zionist hoodlums" off screen. Say what you like about President Ronald Reagan, Mr. Chetwynd told me once, "he got the Jews out of Soviet Russia."
He first broke ranks at an Oxford debate in the 1960s, when none of the American students would take the side of defending U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. Like many Canadian Jews, Mr. Chetwynd had always felt affection towards the United States because of the relative lack of class snobbery and ingrained anti-Semitism, and almost as a lark he volunteered to represent the hawkish position. "For the first time, I felt the wrath of the left," he said. "I began to realize the anti-war movement was really an anti-draft movement."
Mr. Chetwynd's upcoming projects include a PBS movie he's writing about the late Carl Foreman, who wrote "High Noon," "The Bridge on the River Kwai" and many other films but was blacklisted after refusing to testify for the House Un-American Activities Committee. Mr. Chetwynd's script is centered around the remarkable letter Foreman wrote to The New York Times in 1952, which argued that the blame for the Hollywood blacklist extended beyond politicians and studio heads. Mr. Chetwynd likes to quote Foreman's comment about those who imagine themselves rebels because they dislike America: "Beware the fearless defenders of the safely contentious."
Of course, both left and right are political perceptions that change according to where you happen to be standing in history.
"During the blacklist," Mr. Chetwynd said, "the only people who stood up for decency were liberals, but the blacklist is now more than 40 years old. The people right-of-center now are not the people who would have stood shoulder to shoulder with Joe McCarthy. If they were, I would not be amongst them now."
*Miss Seipp is a Los Angeles-based columnist for the online site of Mediaweek. *
2003-09-06 12:36 | User Profile
Il ragno,
Thanks for the information. Apparently, Chetwynd wandered off the kibbutz with the Hanoi Hilton. Now he is back at his primary purpose, making propaganda films like this latest one about Bush.
2003-09-06 13:23 | User Profile
The film about the heroic Bush must be the brainchild of his Zionist handlers to combat his sagging popularity ratings among the lemmings.
Bush is the most mediocre man ever to occuply the Oval Office. If big media were truly fair and balanced, Bush would be in hiding, facing impeachment, together with Cheney.
"The freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic government."
George Mason, Virginia Bill of Rights, 1776.
-Z-
2003-09-06 13:51 | User Profile
[url=http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0335/hoberman.php]http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0335/hoberman.php[/url]
Thatââ¬â¢s Our Bush! The Presidentââ¬â¢s Re-Election Campaign Kicks Off With a Shameless 9-11 Docudrama Lights, Camera, Exploitation by J. Hoberman August 27 - September 2, 2003
Showtime Bush (Timothy Bottoms) gets mega-phony (photo: Ken Woroner/Showtime)
n the end 9-11 turned out to be a made-for-TV movie, or rather, the basis for oneââ¬âa shameless propaganda vehicle for our superstar president George W. Bush.
The upcoming Showtime feature DC 9/11: Time of Crisis is a signal advance in the instant, ongoing fictionalization of American history, complete with the president fulminating most presidentially against "tinhorn terrorists," decisively employing the word problematic in a complete sentence, selling a rationale for preemptive war, and presciently laying out American foreign policy for the next 18 months. "We start with bin Laden," Bush (played by Timothy Bottoms) tells his cabinet. "That's what the American people expect. . . . So let's build a coalition for that job. Later, we can shape different coalitions for different tasks."
Scheduled for cablecast on September 7, DC 9/11 inaugurates Bush's re-election campaign 50 weeks before the 9-11 Memorial Republican National Convention opens in Madison Square Garden. DC 9/11 also marks a new stage in the American cult of personality: the actual president as fictional protagonist.
There are, of course, precedents. "One of the original aspects of Soviet cinema is its daring in depicting contemporary historical personages, even living figures," André Bazin dryly observed in his 1950 essay, "The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema." It was one of the unique characteristics of Stalin-era Soviet movies that their infallible leader was regularly portrayed, by professional impersonators, as an all-wise demiurge in suitably grandiose historical dramas. So it is with DC 9/11, where documentary footage of the collapsing WTC is punctuated by the pronouncements of Bottoms's Bush.
That Bottoms is reconfiguring his role in the Comedy Central series That's My Bush! (a gross-out sitcom canceled a month before 9-11) provides a uniquely American twist. In the aftermath of the first Iraq war, Bush the elder was brought down in part by Dana Carvey's devastating campaign of ridicule on Saturday Night Live. Drafting the clownish Bottoms effectively preempts that strategy. Indeed, casting a former Bush travesty in the role of the serious Bush only reinforces the telefilm's agenda, namely that the events of September 11 served to render divine Bush's dubious mandate.
A movie that attempted to reconstruct Bush's actual activities on 9-11 would be fascinating, if not entirely heroic. A detailed attempt to account for the president's movements and actions on what he later termed that "interesting day" may be found at the Center for Cooperative Research website (cooperativeresearch.org): Bush had just arrived at a Florida elementary school for a pre-planned 9 a.m. photo op when he was informed that a plane had crashed into the WTC 15 minutes before. Bush would later make the impossible claim that he saw the event televised live. (In early December, the president told an Orlando audience he'd been watching TV that morning and saw "an airplane hit the tower of aââ¬âof aââ¬âyou know . . . and I said, 'Well, there's one terrible pilot.' ") As Secret Service men evidently were watching TV in another classroom, however, news of the second crash reached him almost immediately. Bush's startled response, documented on video for all eternity and seen by millions, is restaged in the movie: As Chief of Staff Andrew Card appears beside Bush and whispers in his ear, the president responds with visible shock and panic (the real Bush was more expressive than Bottoms). Missing from DC 9/11 is the president's next moveââ¬âpicking up a children's book called The Pet Goat.
Moment of "Truth": TV Bush stoically receives news of 9-11 attacks. (photo: Ken Woroner/Showtime) By then, back in the real D.C., Secret Service men had already burst into Dick Cheney's office and bodily carried the vice president to a secure location in the White House basement. Meanwhile, responding to Press Secretary Ari Fleischer's hastily scrawled instructions ("DON'T SAY ANYTHING YET"), Bush actually remained in the classroom for almost 10 minutes, taking his time thanking the kids and the teachers ("Hoo! These are great readers . . . ") shortly before boarding Air Force One, where he was informed that his plane was the next terrorist target.
DC 9/11 subtly rejiggers these events so that Cheney is hustled into the White House basement only after Bush is aloftââ¬âthe inference being that the entire leadership was equally dazed and confused, and that relocating Bush was part of the solution rather than one of the problems. According to The Washington Post, Cheney, seconded by Condoleezza Rice, instructed Bush not to return to Washington. Nevertheless, the movie does attempt to deal with the circumstances that had the president largely incommunicado for the rest of the day. According to the Post account, there was little debate on Air Force Oneââ¬âthe plane banked sharply and flew south to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where Bush's first official statement was made at 12:36. He appeared hesitant and nervousââ¬âas does Bottoms in the movie. Within the hour, Air Force One had taken off for another base, and not until that evening, after eight hours flying from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska to Washington, did the president address the nation.
The threat to the president's plane was soon recognized as bogus, although it took weeks for the White House to acknowledge it. By September 13, however, presidential image-maker Karl Rove had released his script: "I'm not going to let some tinhorn terrorist keep the president of the United States away from the nation's capital," Bush had supposedly complained, a line further improved in DC 9/11 as "If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come and get me! I'll be at home, waiting for the bastard!" Simultaneously, the real Rice was detailing Bush's instant grasp of the situation, explaining that he was the first in his administration to understand the meaning of the events.
This is the story of DC 9/11. Screenwriter and co-executive producer Lionel Chetwynd had access to top officials and staffers, including Bush, Fleischer, Card, Rove, and Donald Rumsfeldââ¬âall of whom are played by look-alike actors in the movie (as are Cheney, Rice, John Ashcroft, Karen Hughes, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and Paul Wolfowitz). The script was subsequently vetted by right-wing pundits Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, and Morton Kondracke. Chetwynd, whose vita includes such politically charged movies and telefilms as The Hanoi Hilton, The Heroes of Desert Storm, The Siege at Ruby Ridge, Kissinger and Nixon, and Varian's War, is a prominent Hollywood conservativeââ¬âa veteran of the 1980 Reagan campaign who, after Bill Clinton's election 12 years later, was recruited by right-wing pop culture ideologue David Horowitz to set up the Wednesday Morning Club ("a platform in the entertainment community where a Henry Hyde can come and get a warm welcome and respectful hearing," as Chetwynd later told The Nation).
Chetwynd bonded with Dubya in March 2001 when, at Rove's suggestion, Varian's War was screened at the White House; Chetwynd was subsequently involved in various post-9-11 Hollywood-Washington conclaves and currently serves Bush as part of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Shot largely in Toronto, DC 9/11 was eligible for Canadian film subsidies, but it is, in nearly every other sense, an official production.
Reagan in reverse: a newly contemplative telepresident photo: Ken Woroner/Showtime The Clinton administration was characterized by a cycle of movies featuring Hollywood presidents; a culmination of those fantasies, The West Wing TV series is a virtual presidency set in an ongoing alternate universe. But only twice before DC 9/11 has a reigning president been portrayed in the context of the entertainment machine.
An FDR stand-in appeared briefly in the notorious wartime propaganda epic Mission to Moscow (1943), his back turned discreetly to the camera as he instructs the actor playing Ambassador Joseph Davies to go to Stalin's Soviet Union and "get the hard-boiled facts behind the most dangerous situation in history." Roosevelt reaped no domestic political capital from Mission to Moscow (on the contrary). The real precedent for DC 9/11 is the similarly titled PT 109 (1963), which reconstructed the wartime heroics of then president John F. Kennedy.
While no Hollywood producer ever suggested bringing Dwight Eisenhower's military exploits to the screen, Warner Bros. purchased rights to Robert Donovan's bestselling PT 109 soon after JFK's inauguration. Kennedy's well-publicized escapade as a PT-boat skipper was already an integral part of his image; it was the basis for Kennedy's first congressional campaign in 1946 and figured prominently in the 1960 election. PT 109 was designed to be the greatest campaign poster ever createdââ¬âin widescreen and living color. The White House naturally requested and received approval of the script; and the president effectively cast the actor who was to play him. JFK initially requested Warren Beatty. (Years later, Beatty slyly maintainedââ¬âin an interview with John Kennedy Jr.ââ¬âthat it was the first lady who, having seen him in Splendor in the Grass, proposed that he play her husband.) But Beatty was ambivalent. By one account, when Jack Warner suggested he go to Washington to study the president, Beatty insolently replied, "If the president wants me to play him, tell him to come here and soak up some of my atmosphere."
Watching screen tests flown overnight to the White House that March, JFK nixed teen heartthrob Edd "Kookie" Byrnes (the cute parking-lot attendant on the TV detective show 77 Sunset Strip) and Jeffrey Hunter (who played Jesus Christ in the 1961 King of Kings). The best-known candidate was Peter Fonda, whose father, Henry, had narrated a 1960 Kennedy campaign film concerning PT 109ââ¬âat one point emphatically brandishing a coconut "much like the one" that the future president used to send a message for help. Kennedy tactfully rejected his supporter's son as too young, deciding on the mature-looking Cliff Robertson, who at 36 was a decade older than the man he'd be playing and hence more "presidential."
Would JFK have had the audacity to promote a docudramatization of the Cuban missile crisis as part of his bid for re-election? As political as PT 109, DC 9/11 models Bush on Kennedy's appearances in the 1974 telefilm The Missiles of October, the 1983 miniseries featuring telepresident-to-be Martin Sheen as Kennedy, and particularly, the 2000 feature Thirteen Daysââ¬âselected for the first official Bush White House screening, with Senator Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy in attendance. But however hagiographic, these were period pieces memorializing a dead leader.
The turgid DC 9/11 would doubtless have been more entertaining with Harrison Ford or Arnold Schwarzenegger or even Ronald Reagan in the role of the president. DC 9/11 is instead the spectacle of Reagan in reverse: Rather than being a professional actor who entered politics, Bush is a politician who has been reconfigured, packaged, and sold as a media starââ¬âdialogue included. Indeed, that metamorphosis is the movie's true subject.
The basic Dubya narrative is the transformation of a roistering Prince Hal into a heroic Henry V (as dramatized in the agitprop version of Shakespeare's play staged this summer in Central Park). In DC 9/11, the young Bushââ¬âspoiled frat boy and drunken pranksterââ¬âis subsumed in the image of the initially powerless president. The movie is thus the story of Bush assuming command, first of his staffers (who attest to his new aura with numerous admiring reaction shots) and then the situation. He is the one who declares that "we are at war," who firmly places Cheney (Lawrence Pressman) in his secure locationââ¬ânot once but twice. (To further make the point, Chetwynd has Scott Alan Smith's Fleischer muse that the press refuses to get it: "The Cheney-runs-the-show myth is always going to be with some of them.") Rudy Giuliani, who eclipsed Bush in the days following the attack, is conspicuously absentââ¬âor, rather, glimpsed only as a figure on television.
Rumsfeld (impersonated with frightening veracity by Broadway vet John Cunningham) emerges as the Soviet-style positive hero, embodying the logic of history. In the very first scene, he is seen hosting a congressional breakfast, invoking the 1993 attack on the WTC, and warning the dim-witted legislators that that was only the beginning. Rumsfeld is the first to utter the name "Saddam Hussein" and, over the pooh-poohs of Colin Powell (David Fonteno) goes on to detail Iraq's awesome stockpile of WMDs. But there can be only one maximum leader. Increasingly tough and folksy, prone to strategically consulting his Bible, it is Bush who directs Rummy and Ashcroft to think in "unconventional ways." This new Bush is continually educating his staff, instructing Rice in the significance of "modernity, pluralism, and freedom." (As played by Penny Johnson Jerald, the president's ex-wife on the Fox series 24, Condi is a sort of super-intelligent poodleââ¬âdogging her master's steps, gazing into his eyes with rapt adoration.)
Ultimately, DC 9/11 is less a docudramatic account of historical events than a legitimizing allegory. In glamorizing a living president, it is an opportunistic piece of political mythmakingââ¬âa scenario that effectively bridges the highly irregular maneuvering that brought a popular-vote loser to power in 2000 and the exaggerated, even fabricated, claims with which his regime orchestrated the U.S. invasion of Iraq
Bush's approval rating was hovering around 50 percent on the morning of September 11. Indeed, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden have done so much for Bush's presidency one might reasonably suspect they're being held in a witness protection program. If the Iraq war is integral to America's transformation from republic to empire, then DC 9/11 is part of the process, described by Mark Crispin Miller as Bush's "incarnation as America's Augustus."
Several incidents in the Iraq warââ¬âthe semi-fictional Saving Private Lynch saga, the made-for-TV toppling of Hussein's statue, the outrageous Top Gun photo op with which Bush announced victoryââ¬âare ready to be excerpted in Republican Party 2004 campaign propaganda. DC 9/11 is that propaganda: The "Battle Hymn of the Republic" swells as Bush flies into ground zero, where he astonishes even Rove (Allan Royal) by spontaneously vaulting a police barricade to hop on the rubble and grab the microphone. A nearby fireman, compelled to tell the president that he didn't vote for him, swears allegiance, mandating Bush to "find the son of a bitch who did this." Once Bush realizes that "today, the president has to be the country," Rove considers the image problem solved. Bush, he explains, has become commander in chief and taken back "control of his destiny." The climax is Bush's televised, prime-time September 20 speechââ¬âa montage of highly charged 9-11 footage that ends with the real-life, now fully authenticated Bush accepting the adulation of Congress as he fingers the talismanic shield worn by a fallen New York police officer.
As long as there are parents and children in this world, people will yearn for the illusion of a wise, selfless, divinely inspired leader. As expressed in DC 9/11, this desire is far less complex than the bizarre wish-fulfillment provided by The West Wingââ¬âunless a political miracle occurs and that fantasy materializes with the election of Howard Dean. Both these presidential soap operas offer utopian visions of political leadership. But unlike The West Wing, DC 9/11 gumps a fictionalized hero into real catastrophe to create the myth of a defining moment, and stake its claim on historical truth.